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Banking and Finance

General Trends

Banking and Finance faces dramatic changes driven by globalization and Internet penetration.

Small local banks consolidate into regional banks, then national banks, and eventually global banks. The rapid increase in electronic payment processes is dramatically changing the market structure and opening it up for more intense global competition. Your ability to address this global market for electronic payment services and to offer efficient processes for financial transactions will be a key to creating growth, profitability, and shareholder value. The traditional concentration on financial transactions will evolve into a focus on value-added services that automate and enhance operations in existing markets and enable entry into new markets. Automation will streamline operations, and it will make it easier for you to manage the financial, legal, and governance challenges you face in creating a global business consolidated into a group balance sheet.

eBuilder offers a range of best practice Customized and Community Edition Cloud Processes that enable business-to-business trade, settlement, and payment automation services that are applicable to global financial companies, banks, and credit card companies.

These Cloud Processes offer the following business improvements:


Business Improvements

Reduced Operating Costs

eBuilder's Cloud Processes Automate more than 50% of the manual administration in handling governance, matching, approval, and payment processes.


Reduced Costs for Sourcing

eBuilder’s Cloud Processes enable you to leverage eBuilder’s platform, hosting infrastructure, and highly cost-effective implementation and operation for faster go to market. Our multitude of existing integrations to suppliers, financial players, authorities, etc., together with best-practice business processes and governance practices (SOX, SFTI,...) can leapfrog you into the business of offering attractive and profitable cloud-based financial services.

Improved Customer Satisfaction/Retention

Customer Experience is significantly enhanced by the customer’s access to an online automated service that displays real-time information and statistics from the business processes that are relevant to the customer’s concern. This radically reduces the number of costly customer calls while enhancing the customer’s experience of dealing with your business.

Because the percentage of electronic transactions is increasing exponentially, the potential market for Financial Services based on cloud services will have a crucial impact on your ability to satisfy the present and future needs of your customers.

Enhanced Corporate Dexterity

The ability to handle dynamic complexity will have a vital impact on your competitiveness, profitability, ability to create an eco friendly and sustainable operation, and shareholder value. This is even more challenging when most organizations are increasingly dependent on external collaborating parties (the value network) to deliver end user satisfaction. This growing interdependence is a function of increased competition, entering into new markets, and leveraging cost effective production.

Cloud Processes link and control the value-added activities in the value network and link them to the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) processes. The business rules and terms and conditions that govern the value-added activities are managed centrally by the operational, tactical, and strategic functions in your business to optimize your performance and to adapt to changes. The business improvements actualized by adopting Cloud Processes for the value network are dramatic, for instance, you can achieve ROI after less than six months.

Lean Change Management

The requirements for running a business are increasingly dynamic in a rapidly and unpredictably changing environment. And your business’s ability to react to change has a vital impact on its overall performance. With centrally managed Cloud Processes, business rules, and master data, the business logic and terms and conditions between the participants in the value network can be altered and deployed globally within days.

eBuilder issues quarterly improvements to Community Editions of its Cloud Processes. These improvements are driven by the product roadmaps for each Cloud Process and are based on factual, real-time information relevant for operational, tactical and strategic decisions presented by the Cloud Process service for the relevant target groups.

Lower the Amount of Capital Tied Up in Assets

Leveraging the shortened lead times enabled by end-to-end connectivity, you can reengineer the business process and implement “on demand” sourcing and reduce the number of consolidation points for physical goods, thus reducing the amount of capital you have tied up in assets. For the financial industry, faster payments and better management of cash flow diminish the amount of working capital tied up in receivables and write-offs.

In most cases, Cloud Processes enable “on demand sourcing” for a large part of goods and services the company needs, while maintaining or improving customer service levels and reducing corporate expense by lowering the amount of capital employed. Strategies such as “vendor managed inventory” and outsourcing of order fulfillment are methods used to leverage Cloud Process capabilities.

Boost your competitive advantage

A rapidly growing portion of financial transactions are initiated from electronic orders. During the past five years, business-to-consumer e-commerce has accelerated; and today the multienterprise business-to-business collaboration is experiencing the same growth. This new electronic payment market constitutes an important new growth market to address with competitive online financial services. eBuilder offers payment services built on the Single Face To Industry (SFTI) standard and fully customized processes based on our unique business process network of preintegrated partners and our robust experience-proven modules.

Better information for decision making

eBuilder Cloud Process dashboards provide the operational, tactical and strategic business information that enables digital management of your value network. Among other things, this gives the respective areas of responsibility the base on which to make well-grounded decisions needed to monitor the agreed upon key performance indicators and service level agreements, which are key factors in creating and maintaining a competitive business. The need for relevant and up-to-date information for decision making is met by deploying the Cloud Processes, which connect your value networks. They automatically monitor business events (business activity monitoring) in the entire value network and present relevant data on operational, tactical, and strategic levels together with business intelligence functionality that combines real-time business events into clearly presented statistics for improved business decision making.

This takes management to a new level by focusing on deviations from contracted KPIs and on improvements rather than managing and monitoring operational issues that have little or no value for the end customer. We call this digital management.

Shorter Lead times in operational processes

eBuilder Cloud Processes enable online connectivity end-to-end, access to real-time operational, tactical, and strategic information; and provide best practice business rules. Automation of business processes frees resources from repetitive administrative tasks so they can be used to handle deviations and improvements. This leads to shorter lead times across the end-to-end flow, often in the range of 10-90% reductions.

The improvements are compelling because the Cloud Process’s end-to-end capabilities enable an online strategy for automatic Business Activity Monitoring together with real-time reporting of the results. And they ensure that the information end-to-end is of sufficient quality and always available in the entire business process.


IT Improvements

Lower Costs for IT operations

Most IT organizations have invested heavily in building an enterprise-wide IT infrastructure and ERP functionality. The focus has been on technical implementation, carried out by the business’s own IT organization or outsourced to IT consultants.

The historical trend has been to try to reuse more and more of existing investments and resources and to limit the company’s own investment to what is unique within it to create competitiveness. This can be seen in the evolution from mainframes to client servers, to the PC, to the browser; and from in-house developed code to standard applications. So far, most projects show a limited ability to leverage external assets and investments. This results in long lead times for implementation, unpredictably high costs and a focus on cost reduction. In most cases, this results in the IT organization lagging behind in projects that add immediate business value and instead being forced to focus on lowering costs in managing the infrastructure.

Cloud Processes for the value network give the IT organization an opportunity to implement a strategy for integrating all external business parties (the value network), a strategy that complements the existing ERP and IT infrastructure investment while extending the enterprise-wide business processes into the value network. In the short term, this lowers IT costs and enhances the value of existing investments because Cloud Processes generate a clear and visible business value within a short period of time.

The Cloud Process implementation is completely different from a traditional implementation. For a Community Edition Cloud Process, the implementation process consists of two main activities: Connect to Cloud and operation. The Connect to Cloud project consists of three parts: configuration of the customer-unique business rules, integration of the relevant internal systems, and the addition of unique business partners that are not already connected in eBuilder’s existing business process network. This usually takes less than 15 weeks. Then the operation of the best practice Cloud Process starts. The payment for the connection and operation is done on a transactional basis. ROI has been achieved in less than 6 months for nearly all the projects we have implemented.

The key to this favorable ROI is the degree of reuse. eBuilder Cloud Processes for the value network reuse all the 10 main resources of the Cloud Process implemented in our Accelerator SOA technology environment. They also reuse the seamless integration of the 10 different areas and the supervision and control services that ensure availability, quality in the information content (guarding against information entropy), and technical functionality. Because many customers share the cost of developing and maintaining this generic platform, the cost to the individual user is significantly lower than the cost of implementing such a platform on an individual basis.

eBuilder’s Cloud paradigm enables a whole new way of using IT, where IT becomes the business, and computers execute the basic administration tasks that previously were based on human interaction. It also enables the IT organization to leverage joint infrastructure to address the challenges associated with creating efficiency in the value network.