CHICAGO - John Swainson, president and chief executive of CA, a publicly traded information technology management company, says financial services providers must change the way they view technology and transform their IT environments, if they want to ensure a superior customer experience.
In his keynote at the Foreword Financial Expo, "The Customer Experience: A Powerful Competitive Edge," Swainson described a strategy for effectively achieving that transformation.
"Customer experience in financial services is an electronic experience," said Swainson. "Consequently, IT is not only important to the business of financial services, increasingly IT is the business - it's all about the digital representation of currencies. The biggest threat to any company in any industry is irrelevancy. In an industry such as financial services, where products and services are rapidly becoming commoditized, differentiation is vital to success."
Swainson says companies must re-architect their IT infrastructures to support new business processes.
"That's a challenge when companies have legacy IT systems built up over decades and often assembled through mergers and acquisitions," he said.
Such legacy architectures impede sharing and reuse of application functionality, application integration, and the creation of hybrid applications that support up-selling and cross-selling of new value-added services to financial services customers.
"It's about extending the integration of business process management beyond silos to the enterprise level," Swainson said.
An example from CA
Swainson says "CA looks at the industry in a different way."
"At CA, we've devised something we call the financial services future state architecture," he said. "This is our concept of how IT architecture in financial services needs to evolve to meet the demands of providing superior customer experience."
The financial services future-state architecture maps directly to CA's enterprise IT management vision at four layers: security management, infrastructure optimization, IT governance, and business service management.
Common business services, such as account creation and common IT services, such as identity/access management and workflow, are removed from individual applications and shared system-wide, enabling enterprise-wide risk/compliance management and reporting
Service oriented architecture and services catalog provide consistent access to common IT services, such as e-mail and application services (loans, payments and deposits)
Transaction data/services allow for message-based exchanges between applications (internal and external), either via application invocation or via the SOA "bus." Network services connect the multiple disparate hardware, database and internal/external network components.
