The challenge

To be designated as a “full-service settlement institution”, the Bank needed to be able to provide credit (capital), funds transfer (wire), and security settlement/clearance (safekeeping). However, due to the technical limitations of its previous system, the Bank faced increasing pressure with regards to retaining its existing safekeeping clients and growing its business.

While these same clients valued the advanced capabilities offered by the Bank’s larger competitors, they were dissatisfied with the lack of customer service—the Bank’s competitive edge.

By investing in a new safekeeping system, the Bank would be not only in a position to retain its current clients, but to aggressively pursue those who left, and to expand into new and larger markets.

The situation was further complicated by the fact that the third-party company that supported the previous system announced that it was withdrawing its services, and few Bank employees had knowledge of either the business or the application.

With no off-the-shelf solution available, and lacking the scale necessary to do it on their own, the Bank sought a development partner to mitigate the risk of an in-house development solution.

The scope

A comprehensive study was required to document, in detail, the current business processes and the new requirements.

The new system had to be able to handle all the existing tasks, and establish a competitive advantage by delivering process automation in the areas of trade capture and settlement; pledging; credit verification; client account management; corporate actions and collections; and accounting and reconciliation.

This included trade instructions via the Internet; SWIFT connectivity; real-time trade funding and credit management; real-time reporting; and straight-through processing.

The solution

Qualicom entered into a multi-phase engagement with the Bank, collaborating closely to create an overall strategic roadmap. We undertook a comprehensive requirements gathering project, followed by a feasibility study to investigate possible solutions.

In Release 1, we developed a replacement system with core capabilities to ensure minimal disruption to settlement/clearing operations once the existing system was replaced. For Release 2, we will focus on the enhancements to the core system.

The result

Release is on-track for early 2007.

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