World-class companies turn to GFT

Fraudulent claims are a major concern for insurance companies. Yet timely detection of attempted fraud has remained challenging. Taking advantage of GFT’s experience in Big Data technologies and financial services, HDI Assicurazioni implemented an award-winning solution that enables customer service agents to detect potentially fraudulent claims at the time they are filed

Expert technology consultancy covering ideation, exploration and integration phases for a major global insurance company wanting to leverage artificial intelligence and cognitive technologies to bring customer service to the next Level.

The new mobile app from banking group Crédit Agricole Italia supports teenagers and parents in the daily management of their finances. Through an interface designed for improved usability for young users, the app enables visibility of available funds and transaction history, requests to parents for additional funds through a secured chat, set up of specific saving goals and peer-topeer payments.

In an era that is driven by fast technological enhancements, customers are expecting a fully digital experience. Eventhough broker web portals are the golden source of content, information and data, many haven't evolved over time and remained static. Using open APIs, GFT developed and designed a new business API and broker web portal for this major insurance company.

Regulatory compliance and digitalisation are driving insurance businesses to invest in new and existing IT infrastructure. Meanwhile, insure companies are being forced to improve operational efficiency and drive down costs to remain competitive. Greater process agility is a key feature in reducing process cycle time. GFT developed a customised solution for the Brazilian insurance confederation based on IBM BPM. The solution lead to a rise in demand of more than 5000%.

For an insurance company, managing a claim is the most critical factor in the interaction with the customer. Nevertheless, many insurers are still using ageing, inflexible claim and policy systems to run their core business processes. There are now much more efficient and effective claims management solutions that make it possible to reduce costs and make better use of resources. To raise productivity at HDI Seguros Brazil, GFT implemented an IBM BPM claims management solution.

Mainframes are complex but reliable and fast processing platforms. Their usage outlays constitute a significant proportion of an organisation's IT budget as costs incurred can sometimes be high. Furthermore, according to experts, organisations should expect a 15 to 20% annual increase in CPU resource consumption. Reducing the costs of a company's mainframe environment while minimising risk is therefore a key challenge facing every organisation's IT department. For this Spanish retail bank, GFT improved IT resource consumption and performance by a total of 7966 minutes per month.

As bank IT infrastructures and budgets come under increasing pressure, cost reduction continues to top the industry agenda. Operations managers are expected to improve operational efficiency by 10 to 20 per cent annually. Meanwhile, the cost of IT operations increases by 5 to 10 per cent each year. Within three weeks, GFT significantly reduced CPU usage and identified seven improvement opportunities for this Italian financial institution.

Regulation is a key business driver and a vital part of the decision-making process. Banks dedicate a significant proportion of IT budgets to complying with regulatory reporting standards. There are a number of effective data governance programmes to help financial services institutions cope with the volume, pace and concurrency of regulatory change. To comply with MaRisk and BCBS239 regulations, GFT built a comprehensive professional data model for use in risk management at VW Financial Services.

Financial institutions are seeing increased cost savings from outsourcing systems that enable the bank to run more efficiently. These savings can fuel investments in other areas, especially digital transformation initiatives. For this major global bank, GFT outsourced the full IT services department to our nearshore facilities in Spain. Through the ongoing maintenance and development of the entire application landscape, we leveraged synergies, achieving major cost reductions and efficiency improvements.

Banks are required to process more and more data and be systematic in their approach in order to comply with international and domestic regulations. As a result, regulatory requirements are becoming a major driver of effective data management. For banks, data of high quality can be a major help with decision-making. For this leading Spanish bank, GFT developed and implemented a fully compliant risk and financial status reporting process, also covering CIRBE compliance.

The benefits of cloud computing are huge and include reduced capital expenditures, ongoing cost reductions and scalability. However, moving to the cloud is challenging even if it is also an opportunity to transform the way banks deliver business value to their stakeholders. By moving an existing system that was computer-intensive, time-critical and entailed a high cost of ownership, GFT achieved massive performance improvements for this tier 1 bank, taking it from an on-premise solution to a native cloud. GFT’s big data capabilities on the Google Cloud Platform improved performance by a factor of 24. In the meantime, the native cloud solution is four times cheaper than the previous on-premise solution.

All financial institutions acknowledge the need to harness the vast opportunities provided by cloud computing. But migrating established platforms and applications to the cloud is more than a change in technology. GFT's deep financial service insights and technology capabilities provided tremendous business benefits to the collateral management platform of this leading collateral systems provider.

The application landscapes of large financial organisations have expanded dramatically in recent years, tying up significant resources if they are to be managed effectively. CIOs are facing the challenging task of reducing cost bases while attempting to accelerate delivery times. GFT Cloud Engineering helps financial institutions achieve spectacular performance enhancements. Deploying 28 complex applications through the cloud using AWS and Azure resulted in a 38% improvement in application performance for this US asset manager.

The phenomenon surrounding blockchain/distributed ledger technology (DLT) has sparked a rush of innovation activity within the financial services sector. Firms are beginning to understand the potential use cases of DLT and the impacts it could have on their entire business model. In collaboration with Google, GFT built and deployed a test framework and sandbox on GCP for the Royal Bank of Scotland to prove that the Emerald settlement tool scales on Ethereum.

As banks overhaul and update their customer relationship processes to remain relevant to requirements, after personal financial management (PFM) tools, the next logical step in the digital transformation process is smart transaction management (STM). GFT's trial STM solution enables a reduction in mainframe queries of at least 80%, significantly reducing hosting costs.

Mainframes and the applications they offer handle the core business systems and processes of every organisation, accounting for 30 to 40 per cent of total IT expenditures. This was the motivation for a CIO to maximum systems optimisation for a minimum investment – a goal GFT can relate to! For this leading insurance company in Italy, GFT reduced its batch time window by more than 175 hours per day, proposing more than 23 potential improvements.

Flexible and agile business processes are key to providing state-of-the-art insurance services. Integrating the thousands of business rules that drive price and risk factors is a challenging task. For the vehicle insurance business of this large international insurance company, GFT implemented an agile quotation solution offering outstanding scalability and performance in just 90 days.

Insurance companies all over the world are facing an increased number of claims in a variety of different forms. Many are still using ageing, inflexible claim and policy systems to run their core business processes. Enhancing the customer experience through a simplified claims management process is a challenge faced by many international insurance companies. Working alongside EY, GFT built a single multi-role application to cover the entire process, also improving data quality and tightening anti-fraud detection for this leading international insurer.

New technology will deliver dramatic improvements for insurance companies in the years to come. Insurance companies need to adapt to rapid change to stay competitive. This major Italian insurance company needed to replace its non-compliant legacy claims system in order to improve the efficiency of claims management. GFT designed and implemented a new mobile and web-based solution in under six months resulting in dramatically improved claims management.

Bank customers are at the centre of every operation. As banking services are becoming digital and more individual, barriers to switching banks are decreasing. Improving the customer experience with a cross-channel business model is therefore an inevitable challenge that financial services companies have to face. For this leading Italian bank, GFT designed and built an innovative omnichannel portal encompassing more than 300 functions, providing improved performance and better UX to the banking customer.

Identifying and achieving cost savings is one of the key challenges our clients are currently dealing with. As simple cost-saving strategies have already been implemented, it is becoming more and more difficult to keep meeting efficiency improvement targets. This project focused on the migration of development and support for a critical risk platform to a low-cost location in order to reduce risk and costs.

Powerful risk solutions are increasingly required to meet client's immediate needs and strategic objectives across departments and locations. The group treasury department of this tier 1 bank wanted more proactive management and optimisation of their financial resources. GFT designed an app for treasury management which makes collaboration faster and has effectively reduced regulatory fines.

With rising pressure on banks' IT infrastructures and budgets, for many in the industry cost reduction is at the top of the agenda. As the most immediate strategies for improving efficiency have already been exploited, it is becoming more and more difficult to keep meeting improvement targets. Our global banking client benefited from the improved working practices offered by GFT, based on a proven blend of business knowledge and software development methods.

Insurance fraud causes damages to insurance companies worth billions of euros every year. To reduce insurance fraud at this major international insurance company, GFT tapped into its big data capabilities and developed an agile anti-fraud solution that delivered rapid ROI and improved fraud detection.

One of the main areas of focus with IT projects is cost and time efficiency, especially when improving existing IT platforms or applications, but also when introducing new ones. To keep projects within plan and budget, banks need partners who are able to offer a detailed understanding of financial services. As an industry specialist, GFT offers the combined knowledge and experience of the ETF derivative market and high performance web-based solutions – thus making it possible to build bespoke IT platforms which are not only capable of enhancing liquidity, but which also improve transparency and reduce fragmentation.

By adopting the Bank as a Platform vision, the global bank has been able to support the development of an entire digital banking ecosystem. Appropriate governance rules and secure open APIs mean that third parties can be integrated into the process, setting the stage for a future in which customers can interact with their entire financial lives through a single user interface.

Secure risk management processes are becoming more relevant to bank stakeholders. Scalable, cost- and time-efficient risk processes are therefore a key operational challenge for every CIO in the financial services sector. At this tier 1 investment bank, GFT established standardised processes across the entire credit risk department, significantly reducing data duplication.

Since the crises of 2008, financial services institutions have faced the burden of intense regulatory pressure. New rules, laws and directives have been introduced throughout the world with the aim of fostering transparency, fairness and professionalism. Maximising opportunities in this 'new normal' environment of regulatory change is a key challenge for CIOs. GFT built a comprehensive solution for the Royal Bank of Scotland for use in the global regulatory landscape – addressing current, emerging and retrospective legislation and obligations. In 2015, the innovative solution won RBS the prestigious Banking and Technology Award for 'best use of IT for the purposes of risk/regulatory change management'.

Digital technologies have changed the way banks interact with their customers. Clients expect a customer experience on a level with the digital giants Apple, Google, Microsoft or Facebook. Together with the digital bank Fidor, GFT built an award winning mobile banking solution for telecommunications services provider o2.

The banking industry is currently experiencing the perfect example of a digital storm – a tempest that will have a major impact on client interaction. Transactions are moving from face-to-face interactions between agents and clients to user-friendly, entirely digital platforms. This enables banks to launch new banking services (eg, with mobile P2P transactions) and digitalise traditional banking transactions. Services such as opening an account or taking out a mortgage have not yet been part of the digital revolution. Electronic signatures enable financial service providers to offer quick, user-friendly processes at a fraction of the cost. For this large Spanish bank, GFT defined and implemented a fully compliant centralised signature process for new channels in mobile and online banking.

When it comes to customer service, insurance companies no longer compete with traditional competitors. Customers expect a service on a par with digital giants like Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook. They expect high levels of personalisation, short response times, premium quality services and transparent processes. To comply with this, insurance companies require huge volumes of structured data in a single customer hub, offering daily online updates. For this Italian insurance group, GFT built a front-line CRM solution with a 360º customer view, campaign management and customer communications based on a single data source.

Since the first banking startups entered the financial services market, customers are expecting their banks to provide fully digital payment solutions. In partnership with SIA, GFT built an entire digital wallet solution that is recognised as market standard in Italy. The solution has over 4.2 million users and is deployed at 120 banks.