Case Studies

GLOBAL INSURER

Overview

One of the top ten global insurance companies. They are the market leader in both general insurance and life and pensions in the UK and has major businesses in Continental Europe, North America and Asia.

With focus in Asia, they entered the General Insurance starting with direct online car insurance, and the plan is to gradually increase its portfolio of products to include home and travel insurance.

Challenge

With the direct model for General Insurance, they had an aggressive go-to-market timeline. The challenge is to build an online system quickly, yet providing the ease of use and integrated with the existing backend systems, in order to achieve fast turnaround in the end-to-end processing and at the same time creating a user experience that is delightful so that they will keep returning.

Sciente's Value

Sciente partnered with the insurer to quickly form a team of able professionals to build the online portal.

Our team worked extended hours to design and build the platform which allows the firm to introduce multiple different products to their customer more efficiently.

The insurer was able to gain good traction in the general insurance market in Singapore within six months after the system when live. It also helped the firm to reduce some of its complex back office processes through the implementation of straight through processing and common client.

TELECOM SERVICE PROVIDER

Challenge

One of the innovative Telecom Service Provider in Asia, providing a wide range of telecommunication services and creating a significant brand and market share through their strategic and innovative approach.

The explosive business growth and diversity of services provided started putting strain on their existing IT systems, the management decided they need to transform their existing IT systems in order to meet the demands of the market place and provide flexibility for them to provide innovative services.

The company embarked on a multi-year transformation program to change their core systems from Front-to-Back, covering CRM, BI as well as Billing.

Sciente's Value

Sciente worked closely with the team to assist in the Change Management aspect of the project. This stream is important as managing change in such a large program is essential to the success of the project.

Our team assisted in organization-wide deployment readiness UAT, Defect Tracking and Training services which cover more than 2000 users over a very tight time frame.

A GLOBAL BANK - Quality Initiatives

Challenge

The bank as part of global initiatives to leverage on industry best practices to better manage their internal IT projects, processes and service delivery, started to focus on two key quality initiatives namely ITIL and CMMI.

The challenge in Asia is to have a team who believes in the benefits of these quality initiatives and work with the existing IT process owners to incorporate these quality processes, metrics and guidelines. The objective is to improve the overall delivery of IT services to the business and also to have predictability, consistency in the whole process.

Sciente's Value

Sciente partnered with the bank to form a team of quality professionals for both CMMI and ITIL practitioners and experts. We worked on the following areas:

• Delivery Management
• Incident Management
• Change & Release Management
• Configuration Management
• Verification & Validation
• CMMI gap analysis
• Conduct CMMI Process Trainings and Facilitations
• Conduct CMMI Process Audits and document non-conformances and best practices
• Ensure CMMI compliance in the all projects

A GLOBAL BANK - Capital Markets Projects

Challenge

As the world looks toward growth in Asia, this bank who already has been doing very well in Asia, wants to further solidify their presence in Asia. To that they invested in building strong Capital Markets team and systems.

The challenge is to build a strong team with niche skills who can understand what the business needs are and also good technical expertise and management expertise for effective execution.

Sciente's Value

Sciente partnered with the bank on both their global as well as regional initiatives. Our project managers, business analysts, test analyst and developers integrated into the company's project team to assist with the following:

• Trading platforms implementation covering multiple asset classes
• Risk platform implementation

The team we helped the bank to form comprises of professionals with very strong business domain as well as technical capabilities. They also possess specific skill sets to meet the challenges of the various trading platforms implementation in the region. The diverse, multi-cultural team brought the required experience and execution for the projects which have very aggressive timeline.

Corporate Banking Transformation

Challenge

The bank has a bold plan to transform multiple systems for corporate banking. This transformation projects covers almost all lines of business in Corporate banking:

• Cash Management
• Trade Finance
• Securities & Fiduciary Services
• Electronic Banking
• Credit

The transformation covers from Front to Back Office, including their Risk Management as well as parts of Core Banking platform.

The complexity of the transformation involves many stakeholders, vendors, systems and countries.

Sciente's Value

Sciente started partnering with the bank to help them in their major pain areas, that is, in business technology area. Our team of professionals provided the much required business and technology knowledge for the overall project team. We had a diversified team assisting them in the following areas:

• Internet Banking
• Corporate Loans
• Core Banking Integration
• Liquidity Management
• Trade Finance
• Securities Fiduciary Services, Trust Administration
• Data Warehousing

They primarily worked on requirement analysis, project and vendor management for the multi-country implementations.

Global Equities IT Team

Challenge

A strategic move to build a specialized team of Equities IT to be part of a broader global team. As the nature of work required by the team is highly specialized and technical, the initial seed team is important to build the confidence of the global stakeholders.

It is to this effort that Sciente was engaged to jointly help build this competent team in Asia.

Sciente's Value

Sciente worked closely with the client to understand the needs of this competency center and provided our rapid team formation services. The scope covers:

• Sales/Trading Applications
• Electronic Trading Applications
  • Algorithmic, Crossing Engine, Client Connectivity and Market Connectivity
• Risk Management

Data Center Migration & Consolidation

Challenge

Our client as part of a strategic decision decided to consolidate their regional Data Center and move it into another country.

The consolidation in itself was already a large project and that coupled with migrating it to a new country. The overall project management, putting in place the required operational processes and minimizing the downtime presented great challenge to the team.

Sciente's Value

Sciente's team works with the client and assisted them in many of the sub-projects within this Data Center program.

One of the tasks we had to assist was relocation planning which involved much regulatory challenges and guidelines. We also helped review and provide feedbacks on project plans and schedules and provided project management bandwidth for the printing to be outsourced.

We also jointly reviewed Data Centre operations processes to enhance and improve overall operational efficiency in the new Data Center.

Back Office System implementation and subsequent Application Maintenance

Challenge

The bank had an old back office Fixed Income/Foreign Exchange system for processing clearing and settlement instructions generation, advices/confirmations and accounting etc.

They wanted to replace the old system with a new platform for the Asia Pacific Region.

Sciente's Value

Sciente formed a team of Business Analysts and Project Managers to complement the bank's team. The result was the successful re-platform of the back office system.

Our team was involved in project scoping and planning, tracking and reporting progress, defining the business requirements, planning and coordinating UAT and cutover activities and post implementation support.

We also formed a separate production support team to maintain and support the new system after the new system was successful deployed.