Financial Services Provider Aligns IT with Business Objectives

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

The client was losing business and facing a declining account portfolio, due in part to its client fee structure, known as cost-per-loan (CPL). The company's CPL was higher than the industry average, and this aggressive fee was driving away business from existing and potential accounts. Furthermore, their operational and underlying IT environment was not scalable.

Manual workarounds and an outdated core operational system limited their ability to effectively service and grow existing accounts. The mainframe-like core system did not support many of the business processes and services. A large percentage of the IT budget sustained an ineffective system and did not align with business objectives for growth and innovation. Also, the infrastructure lacked a disaster recovery and security plan, exposing critical vulnerabilities with internal and client information. The lack of SAS-70 compliance limited expansion into additional account segments.

To ensure the long-term viability of the organization and to plan for growth, the company engaged Agile to develop an IT Roadmap to better support Operations and shift from "running" the organization to transforming the organization.

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

Annual Savings of $230,000

Agile created an actionable IT Roadmap to align IT investments with business vision and objectives. This roadmap outlined the strategic and tactical projects and activities with corresponding ROI. In less than two years, the business's recognized benefits will outweigh investment by $80K per year. In addition, Agile identified areas to better leverage existing vendors and consolidate services. Agile renegotiated services and contracts, saving the company over $150K per year.

"Agile identified immediate- and short-term areas of opportunity," says the client. "These opportunities will reduce IT operating costs, enhance communication between IT and stakeholders, and solidify an infrastructure for business growth."

Improved Business Processes and Productivity

Agile created a 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.

Improved Security and Disaster Recovery through Outsourcing

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

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, the 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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