Currently Browsing : bsg insight

David Reinhardt, BSG Principal Consultant, presented a talk titled “Did BA’s become irrelevant when business learned to code?” at a recent industry conference. The talk examines the progression of the relationship between Strategy, Business, IT and the Customer. We love to talk about this. Please make contact if you would like to discuss any of the ideas in this presentation.   In the run-up to the conference, David also authored a blog post talking about the role of trust and the transition from a specification/control world to a process/trust world. Read it here

Why is this important? Why is it happening? The retail investment market has been a lucrative space for many years, however over the last decade it has had its fair share of scandals. The key area of concern currently under scrutiny is the delivery of financial advice and the subsequent sale of financial products. With the current approach, financial advisers receive commissions on products provided to clients – a framework that can introduce a bias to the financial advice which is given. Product providers that offer advisors attractive commissions get favoured, very often steering advisors away from keeping clients’ interests [&hellip

by Michael Railton Challenges are just opportunities to think differently Offshoring has its horror stories. Many of them resulting from putting the desire to drive cost down ahead of the desire to deliver against business benefit. Throwing specs “over the fence” may be cheap, but there is often significant business upheaval in the wake of a poorly built software system. The cost of correction (in the software) and disruption (in the business) is often significantly greater than would’ve been incurred had a smarter approach to working as a team been pursued from the outset. Effective collaboration within distributed development teams is [&hellip

by Jacqui Newling, owner of our regulatory compliance service We’re helping many of our banking clients to effect the implementation of regulatory change. These programmes are extensive and complex. In order to help get our head around this, we took some time to reflect and identify key themes in these programmes. Taking a macro view allows us to consider how to implement these changes in a flexible and scalable manner. Our belief is that institutions that are setup to roll out compliance change effectively and quickly will be in a better position to focus on the business rather than the [&hellip

There’s been a lot of banter recently about ‘banking culture’, how it’s all wrong and it’s at the heart of many of the bank’s problems – particularly that of investment banks. The industry has become synonymous with society’s ills – greed, immorality, recklessness – and bankers are emblazoned in scandal. They’re responsible for everything from miss-selling insurance products to being conduits for money laundering and rigging Libor (or, if you like, Lie-bor). All of this comes in the wake of a financial meltdown. Caused by bankers. Saved by the taxpayer

For the second year running, the UK International Institute of Business Analysts (IIBA) published the results of an industry-wide Business Analysis survey. For that same second time round, the BSG BA team, many of whom completed the survey questionnaire, reviewed the results and discussed some observations. BSG (UK) – Reflections on 2012 IIBA BA survey version 1 from BSG (UK)

Compliance related fines totalled more than $3.5bn in 2012. Financial sector compliance has moved from the business pages to the front page. LIBOR, regulations, capital adequacy, anti- money laundering and other industry terms are becoming discussed as regularly as last week’s football results. We’ve observed in many clients that when people speak about compliance it tends to be reactive – a problem has been identified and it needs to be fixed. Businesses tend not to see compliance in a strategic fashion as it has traditionally been a cost centre that has not contributed to the bottom line. A seismic perception [&hellip

Compliance is just a business case for another form of business change. In a recent assignment to assess FATCA readiness at a banking client, we discovered that the three different banking products each had a different front-office origination process. In the wake of this discovery, part of our recommendation set was, unsurprisingly, to consolidate processes and reap the various benefits that accrue from this. It all seems so obvious – but is it really? All too often All too often compliance projects start with a specific endpoint – ensure that we get the compliance projects relevant tick in the relevant [&hellip