Financial Services Provider Embraces Emerging Opportunities in a Shifting Market

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

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.

In the competitive, commoditized, and increasingly scrutinized financial industry, operational and IT effectiveness along with innovation are vital for long-term survival.

While organizations in the financial and insurance sector must deliver today's services quickly and flawlessly, they must also take the time to develop capacities, technologies, and services for the needs of tomorrow's market. This proactive approach requires a new level of performance and a capacity to look through the walls of the organization, distinguishing accepted ways of business for transformational opportunities.

The company engaged Agile to provide a strategic framework and actionable roadmap focused on prioritizing initiatives that would create operations and IT efficiency and effectiveness. This infrastructure would support the sales pipeline, and allow the client to focus on closing larger deals in order to grow the business.

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
• Current state system documentation
• Known issues, pain points, and workarounds
• Current state metrics and cost of status quo

Analysis and Assessment

• Integrate system improvement areas with business process re-engineering findings
• Define future state system
• Conduct cost/benefit analysis

Recommendation

• Create IT Roadmap to address gaps and business process re-engineering
• Determine ROI and initiative prioritization
• Define sourcing strategy
• Define timeline and communications plan for roadmap

Results

Agile identified immediate- and short-term opportunities to reduce operational and IT costs and solidify an infrastructure for business growth.

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," says the client. "And 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."

Improved Security and Disaster Recovery through Outsourcing

First, Agile recommended an outsourced Infrastructure solution that enabled SAS-70 compliance, opening the potential for new revenue streams and additional accounts not possible in the existing IT environment. This shift to an outsourced model also addressed the security and disaster recovery risks and vulnerabilities identified in the current state.

Improved Business Processes and Productivity

Agile reduced operations workload by 60 hours/week through improvements to the operational system that automated manual workarounds. Agile's plan to enable the client to continue leveraging the investment in the core operational system while (a) creating a user-friendly interface to improve usability, (b) add additional functionality to support business processes and services, and (c) expand the system features to allow account self-service as another vehicle to reduce operational overhead.

Reduced Implementation Cycle Times & Improved Customer Satisfaction

Agile's Implementation Playbook defines and documents a repeatable process for account implementations. The Playbook is expected to reduce implementation cycle times by 20%, improve customer satisfaction, and elevate employee morale and effectiveness.

Business scalability and sustainability, once limited by process inefficiencies, are now possible. The client explains, "The company is now free to spend more time and budget innovating for the future versus maintaining processes of the past."

At the close of the engagement, the company retained Agile's CIO Advisor to help implement the recommended IT Roadmap. "By utilizing Agile's recommended Roadmap, our company was able to redirect the IT budget to achieve reductions in IT and Operations costs," states the client. "We can now effectively align IT spending with the needs of the business, and that ability provides tremendous value."

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