Banking & Finance

IPL provides a unique brand of business and technical competencies to the Banking and Finance sector. Drawing on years of formative and hard-won experience in other industries we bring levels of precision and rigour to our services that are truly exceptional.

Clearly our clients like our approach. We have provided high value consulting and information-intensive solutions to enterprises as diverse as: Bristol & West Investments, Clerical Medical, Endsleigh, HBOS, Nationwide, Teachers Assurance, and Zurich.

For instance, IPL delivered an on-line mortgage solution for Nationwide. We developed the complete e-business front end for the new channel to market and its interaction with back-office systems. The project was completed on time and within budget in less than 5 months, from requirements through to implementation. Accepting mortgage applications continuously since “go-live”, the system has placed Nationwide at the forefront of on-line customer experience.

Today's unprecedented turmoil in the Banking and Finance sector is already driving the need for great structural and procedural change as enterprises move decisively to adapt. In particular, increased levels of government intervention and regulatory control will undoubtedly result in a huge burden of new legislation and compliance. IPL's Business Consulting and Information Management practices are perfectly equipped to help with the necessary transformational activities.

Discover more about IPL's unique solutions for Liquidity Reporting and Transparency.

Asset & Unit Pricing Control

Fund managers are under great pressure to increase diversity, provide transparency and lower admin costs, whilst ensuring compliance, maintaining reputation and mitigating risk. It is vital that Net Asset Value (NAV) errors, such as incorrect asset valuations and inaccurate booking of trades, are discovered before the distribution of prices. IPL's FundEYE product provides the perfect, cost effective solution. FundEYE features include:

  • rapid price signoff
  • tracking price drift
  • verifying NAVs via complex verification rules
  • publishing prices
  • providing a full audit trail

Through a combination of expertise, experience and products, IPL can help fund managers take control of the many challenges in today's market.

Find out more about FundEYE here.

Enterprise Architecture

IPL understands that data is the key corporate asset that fuels competitiveness and facilitates compliance. But with so much data being generated and stored, how do you exploit it to achieve these goals? To maximise the benefit of such a valuable asset requires structure and direction. It requires a business centric view of data that cascades, top down, into your IT systems. IPL's consultants have the ability to see the bigger picture and understand how your business objectives can be translated into a systems architecture that achieves these objectives.

Business Process Management

If Enterprise Architecture is the framework which gives structure and direction to your data and IT systems, BPM is the substance which gives it life. With a coherent structure in place, IPL can help you design and implement streamlined processes to ensure the efficient execution of your business. Whether you are aiming to reduce the time spent on-boarding new staff, or completely re-designing your core lending processes to minimise application turn-around times, IPL has the expertise to help.

Core Banking Systems

The vast majority of financial organisations operate on legacy systems. Indeed, as the sector has predominantly grown via merger and acquisition over the years, the average systems landscape will contain many disparate and increasingly unsupportable components. Organisations can delay replacing such systems as the cost, complexity and risk can been seen as prohibitive. However, as competition increases and the burden of regulation and compliance grow, such legacy systems can become a barrier to business efficiency. IPL has the expertise and focus on quality to aid Financial Service providers to confidently replace their legacy systems.

On-line Application Development

To gain competitive advantage and reduce overheads, Financial Services organisations are increasingly driven to exploit the growing willingness of customers to utilise on-line or 'on demand' services. However, such solutions need to provide what they purport to offer – quick, logical processes that are intuitive, easy to use and secure. In reality, on-line applications can be less than user friendly. As a consequence, the customer fails to complete their transaction. These systems must also be extremely robust – should applications be unavailable, large volumes of business and data can be lost. IPL has experience of developing many such systems, with the security and robustness required, whilst maintaining an intuitive and easy to use customer interface.

Data Management

Data is at the heart of financial organisations. However, with complex system landscapes existing in most organisations, can you truly achieve a single view of your customer? How accurate is your data? With the ever increasing burden of compliance and the advent of SOA, structured data modelling, combined with data lineage needs to be considered to ensure best practice and mitigate risk. IPL's industry recognised experts can provide a complete Data Management service.

Read more about IPL's Information Management Services for Financial Service Providers.

Systems Integration / Data Consolidation and Migration

As the drive for growth continues, mergers and acquisitions become an increasingly important element of corporate strategy. IPL has a great deal of proven capability integrating systems and consolidating / merging data for international organisations and the largest of their acquisitions. Examples of the projects IPL has undertaken include the merging of 1.6M accounts with a value of £7.4bn, on-time and with minimal disruption to the availability of core systems at a high street bank. IPL has also designed and developed a data warehouse allowing a multi-national organisation to compile sales data from across the world to present a single, timely and accurate view of its global trading.

Regulatory Compliance

In the wake of the recent credit crunch, the FSA and EU advisory bodies are imposing ever greater requirements on financial institutions around capital adequacy and transparency. The imminent requirement is for ‘Liquidity Reporting’ – more accurately Group Consolidated Reporting of Liquidity Risk under normal and ‘stressed’ conditions.

Discover more about IPL's unique solutions for Liquidity Reporting and Transparency.