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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.