Financial Services Provider Maximizes Returns on Investments

Agile’s client provides products and services to financial institutions nationwide. For decades, the company has helped lenders protect against collateral losses on a variety of assets, including real estate, conventional and recreational vehicles, watercraft and mobile homes. The company also offers a wide range of solutions to support its customers’ checking, savings, commercial and home warranty offerings.

Challenge

Like many organizations with a long history, Agile's client had created a line of operational
processes and disjoined IT assets as the business grew and evolved over the years. In response to market demands and opportunities, the business continued to implement new processes and systems, both manual and automated, to support the latest products and services.

Flash forward to the present. The company found that one of its divisions was losing money because the IT system's costs far outweighed the revenue it supported. In the face of amplified competition, commoditized services, and increased customer demands, our client knows that operational and IT effectiveness, balanced with innovation, is vital for long-term success. That's why the company chose Agile to analyze existing investments, evaluate business strategy and objectives, identify and plan projects and initiatives to support business direction, and perform the necessary financial analysis to qualify and prioritize IT projects.

The Agile Solution

Agile's eight week approach blended onsite interviews, observations, and discussion with offsite analysis. The process occurred in three major phases:
Information Gathering

• Business strategy and objectives
• Existing budgets, contracts, and expenses
• Planned and completed projects
• IT and operations review

Analysis and Assessment

• Detailed review of budgets and expenses
• Reviewed vendor lists, scope of service and contracts
• Conducted cost/benefit analysis for each recommendation

Recommendation

• Created IT Roadmap and Operations Roadmaps to meet business objectives
• Determined ROI and initiative prioritization
• Defined sourcing strategy
• Defined timeline
• Defined communication plan for roadmap

Results

Streamlined Operations and Reduced Costs

Agile created a reusable model to help the client evaluate investment alternatives and make informed decision. Agile delivered a detailed tactical and strategic IT and Operations roadmap outlining recommended projects and initiatives, initial cost of implementation, ongoing cost, annualized benefits, and priority. Within two years, the company will achieve a breakeven on investment and realize $80K savings per year.

Agile identified and created a plan to outsource the infrastructure, which will improve uptime, availability and reliability while reducing business risk. Agile also improved vendor leverage, consolidated services, and renegotiated contracts, saving the client $150K per year.

"The roadmap Agile produced is invaluable because we now have a strategy that ensures we move forward with only those projects that add real value to the business," states the client. "The cost savings their plan has on the business is immediate. Agile was able to identify annual savings of $230,000 in just the first two years."

Shifted Spending Model to Transform Business

In addition, Agile discovered that the majority of the IT spending (70%) was on maintaining
existing systems. As a result, Agile created a feasible plan that reduced the cost of maintenance to 20%, allowing the client to utilize the remaining 80% on new development of systems to in order to meet business needs. With this shift in spending, the client has the capacity for ongoing business innovation and sustainable model for financial analysis and decision making.

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