Most companies are not getting the value for the investment in their applications. Plain and simple. Firms are practically throwing money down the drain by purchasing these expensive platforms and not getting the bang for their buck. A fully configured application should be able to provide your firm with increased efficiency, reductions in cost, and provide overall scalability.

However, if you are not gaining these benefits from your software, it’s time to take a step back. A failed implementation could cause the opposite of the desired outcomes. This under-utilization can be due to:

1. A weak support system in place for the maintenance of the software
2. Lack of communication to the employees of the software’s full functionality
3. Lack of proper employee training in the application

Having the right support model in place to oversee the setup and continued maintenance of the application can help insure that the platform is properly aligned with your firm’s daily operations and all updates are made regularly to avoid lag or error.

Establishing a communication plan within the firm for internal resources to fully develop an understanding of what the application is capable of creates a baseline for what the expectation is from the platform, and how it could best be used to meet the client’s goals. Identifying the right material requirements to develop a robust platform to best fit your firm’s needs requires personnel that truly understand the software’s usability and functionality.

Having a team dedicated to software training creates a sense of ownership for the system, as this team can communicate to other members of the firm the immense capacity for automation across different functional areas which they can train other firm members in. Openly communicating the status of the platform’s setup and capabilities also reduces the risk of functional teams working in silos.

FinServ has had experience with high-growth clients going through similar pain points during the implementation of an systems to automate their day to day operations. We take a comprehensive approach in order to understand your bespoke business processes to help guide your firm towards a seamless software integration and ultimately, future success.

 To learn more about FinServ Consulting’s services, please contact us at info@www.finservconsulting.com or (646) 603-3799.

It’s a new year and Workday’s Semiannual Release is fast upon us. As always we recommend thoroughly reviewing the Announcing and Feature Consideration documentation and review the notes in the Release Center prior to the release date, March 9^th, 2019. With new features available in Preview Tenants starting on February 2nd, your team can get a jump start on reviewing and testing the new release features to ensure there are no major impacts to your tenant. Here are a few tips that have served us well with past clients:

1. Prioritize the features. The first action we recommend customers take is to review all the release features and prioritize which items are High or Low impact. It’s important to identify which updates may directly impact your tenant or indirectly impact other systems. Use the tools Workday provides, they offer a spreadsheet that categories each new release feature. It’s a quick and easy way to understand all the release features. In this semiannual release the Workday Inbox worklet is being retired and there  are new updates for Payroll integrations. We’d label the Workday Inbox worklet as Low Impact since the Inbox now is featured directly on the Home screen. For those clients with a third party payroll system, the Payroll integration updates could be a High Impact so it’s important to review the release notes and thoroughly test.

2. Adjust your project plan. In a previous post we wrote about the importance of creating an annual Workday project plan. Once you’ve identified how the release will impact your tenant, make sure to adjust your project plan so that it accounts for the time you’ll spend testing the new features. Ideally, you factored the Release into your Workday project plan but make sure you adjust appropriately if other initiatives need to take a backseat while you prepare for the semiannual release.

3. Enlist help. Enlist the help of your team and other users to make sure that you’ve adequately tested the functionality. It’s okay to have one person lead the Semiannual release preparation but we recommend spreading the testing among your Workday team and other employees at the firm. You’ll want to make sure you test every scenario and examine all the details, which is doable with the help of others.

4. Communicate to your Super Users. If you’ve identified items that will impact your tenant or new features your team could leverage we recommend getting the word out as soon as possible. In past releases we’ve seen updates to functionality that seem minor, like modifying the way a phone number is entered into Workday, create a lot of noise for your other infrastructure teams.

FinServ has experience advising clients on Workday’s semiannual release, including assessing which features will impact the client’s tenant, recommending new features to adopt, and testing existing functionality and integrations. We also work with clients to plan their annual Workday initiatives, build new functionality, and maintain their system security.  To learn more about FinServ Consulting’s services, please contact us at info@www.finservconsulting.com or (646) 603-3799.

Why You Should Care About the 4th Industrial Revolution

When we speak to our clients about Industry 4.0, the most common question is, what is it? Why should I care? The term itself does not matter. What does matter is, the name acts as a focal point to enable FinServ to focus our clients on what does really matter.

Whether it is: 1) New technologies embedded in the best industry applications, 2) New agile governance models being put in place, or 3) The core aspects of data privacy that are drastically changing, we believe our client’s need to be ready to adopt and adapt to each of these disruptive forces.

Sears a Cautionary Tale

I was recently watching a piece on how Sears, a company that once was on top of innovation is now going out of business. Each of these anecdotes shows that even the best of funds could end up losing its investors if they do not continue to innovate and take advantage of what technology is offered. There are always hungry new funds, just like Amazon was to Sears that will be more than happy to take your position and your investors if you do not stay on the leading edge. 

The Key Challenge

Due to security concerns our industry is a laggard to most new and emerging technologies. While many firms took advantage of the public cloud, a surprisingly high number of our clients are still hesitating to take advantage of this key resource.

We agree with our clients in terms of utilizing the highest standards of protection for their client and investment data, but this should not keep you from adopting technologies in an intelligent manner. It takes extra work and due diligence, but these technologies like public clouds can be safely and securely implemented for any firm. The most critical step is to hire an expert in the technology to ensure it is configured with all the most important safeguards in place.

When you set up a server on Amazon Web Services (“AWS”) you can leave yourself completely open to attack, or you can configure with all the tools AWS provides to be more secure than your own private cloud. It only requires the expertise to know how to complete the configuration.

Speed with Purpose

The terms speed with purpose was  something I first came across during my time at KPMG. It was used to describe one of the core values of the firm. I always loved this phrase, because it described something I always believed in, that you should take action and produce outputs and outcomes as quickly as you can. The word purpose added something essential. Purpose highlights that you should not be reckless in your pursuits, and it further suggests that you could act thoughtfully at the same time.

We believe this is exactly how our client base should act towards the technologies and changes that relate to the 4th Industrial Revolution. Our clients should dive into these technologies now, while ensuring that as they implement the changes they are taking the proper precautions, and putting into place the proper controls that will continue to protect their businesses from crucial errors.

Applying the Technologies to our Industry

One key technology Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) is critical to our industry. AI has been a large focus on many funds for several years now.

Whether it be the Investor Relations group using predictive analytics to identify the best investors to pursue, or the front office using prescriptive analytics to draw up specific recommendations in investing you can’t deny the value of these technologies.

Lessons from Data Warehouse Experiences

The biggest barrier to getting on these technologies was the cost and time to set them up. Over the past decade, many clients engaged FinServ in discussions about creating data warehouses. Less than 10% of those clients actually took any real steps to create them, and far fewer ever realized the final goal or benefits.

Thanks to SAAS-based solutions and virtual computing new AI engines are popping up all over the place. These solutions offer a very low-cost entry to powerful AI engines. Microsoft, Salesforce, and SAP just to name a few vendors offering AI platforms that can be acquired and setup in weeks or months.

We strongly suggest before selecting one of these platforms that you do conduct a full vendor selection. Like all system selections ensuring you are picking the right solution that fits your specific requirements is critical. Each of these AI platforms do have their own strengths and weaknesses and aligning those to your business is paramount. As part of this selection process we endorse vetting the security and controls provided by each of these vendors.

One Real World Example

Up to this point we have spoken about why you should adopt new technologies and spoken to most of the reasons firms hesitate to act. Providing an example how a technology today can enhance one common pain point may be the best way to bring people over to adoption.

From the dawn of computerization the dependency of getting users to enter their data into the system has been a large issue. Now with our smartphones we have a device that when combined with AI technology can alleviate that issue. Salesforce introduced Einstein Voice which leverages your voice allowing you to dictate important notes into your smartphone and the AI portion of this solution than intelligently identifies the components of your data and links that to your CRM / sales system as an example to route your information intelligently to those people in your firm who need to act on that data.

Einstein Voice

The Bottom Line

New technologies are arriving at our doorstep with regularity and speed we have never seen before. Knowing which ones to choose and how to safely and effectively implement them can be daunting. You should not let security concerns hold you back from ensuring your fund can compete for investors who are becoming more savvy and discerning about their choices of funds. If anything adopting these new tools will ensure they see you as an innovator worth investing in.

FinServ can help you plan for and implement these technologies in a safe and effective manner with time tested methods and the speed required to have you up and running in the most expedient time possible.

To learn more about FinServ Consulting’s services, please contact us at info@www.finservconsulting.com or (646) 603-3799.

Learn Blockchain

If you still think blockchain is just another buzzword, now is the time to start becoming more familiar with it. A decentralized ledger is probably the most disruptive technology we’ve seen since the introduction of email and AOL’s dial-up. With more and more companies investing in blockchain, the use of the public ledger will become a critical component to an organization’s technological infrastructure, especially within the financial services industry. In short, blockchain effectively eliminates the middleman and any associated fees, so that only the seller and buyer are involved in the transaction. This poses a huge risk to brokers, banks, government backers, and any other agent or third-party normally facilitating the transaction and earning fees as a result of it.

JP Morgan and Mastercard have already created their own blockchain networks to streamline payments faster and more securely.

Everything Will Live in the Cloud

If you’re still operating with enormous amounts of hardware, it’s time to rethink that. Yes, we’ve heard time and time again concerns about security within the cloud. However, from our personal experience with implementing cloud solutions, we can attest to the fact that the leading hedge funds and asset managers have made this transition at least a year ago.

Why?

The better question to ask is, why haven’t you? The cost savings are staggering. The dollars you pay for your data centers, servers’ maintenance, and your IT staff can be reinvested in your top talent, Human Resources, and other departments that need it. Not to mention, cloud solutions are extremely reliable, with services available 99.99% of the time. Along with that, so much more productivity and collaboration that can be achieved through the cloud, especially now that the workforce is more mobile than ever.

If you’re not already investing heavily in one of these areas, you’re going to be left behind. 2020 is less than a year away. Let that sink in.

The Mandate

For over a year and a half, during my role as a Project Manager (PM) for one the world’s largest fund administrators, my primary mandate was to help them execute and deliver on platform and client enhancements, all while helping shepherd the Technology organization into using the Agile development methodology. The organization, by virtue of being one of the more established banks on Wall Street, was staffed with what you’d call ‘lifers’, or ‘near-lifers’. These were employees who have spent almost their entire careers at one organization. This was not a young, ambitious and progressive fintech company.

Within a week of joining, the mandate had come down from the CEO of the fund administration business that they were moving from traditional waterfall development to Agile development. The primary driver for this was to better service their client base by delivering change in a quicker and more effective manner. We planned workshops with all of the stakeholders – product managers, technologists, operations and business staff. The bank hired a seasoned Agile consultant and led the three day workshop. We listened to the Product Managers and Business staff as they discussed their pain points and issues. We then wrote user stories as a way of shaping the features they envisioned for the new Middle Office platform.

The Challenge

As the PM for the Middle Office/Derivatives workstream, my remit consisted of overseeing five different teams – derivatives lifecycle, pricing, messaging / enrichment, collateral management and reconciliation. The technology owners were based in the US, London and India. The staff was spread across all three regions and time zones.

Lessons Learned

NB: I’ll start using some Agile/Scrum terminology that you may not be familiar with. In that case, please refer to this site: https://www.scrum.org/resources/what-is-scrum

What did I learn?

• The scrum masters assumed an all-knowing persona and didn’t feel like they needed to listen to the Product Owners.
• As expected, many people decried the move to Agile development and didn’t believe that some usable functionality could be delivered in a three week sprint.
• The technology owners realized that some of their dev teams were Waterfall, while others were Agile and found it too difficult to cope.
• Product Owners and Business staff, after having relayed their requirements, felt they didn’t need to attend sprint showcases. These showcases were meant to demo new functionality every three weeks and ensure that the builds were tracking towards a minimum viable product.
• Many found the Scrum ceremonies – daily 15 minute stand ups, sprint planning, backlog grooming, showcases – too time-consuming.
• Product Owners used the Project Managers as their proxies for these meetings. They couldn’t be bothered with helping with scope and prioritization.
• Some didn’t grasp the concept of story pointing, the concept of relative sizing and the Fibonacci sequence.
• The definition of minimum viable product became distorted and meant whatever IT could deliver within a specified timeframe. This meant that if they planned for 10 items and could only deliver 6 of them…well, that’s our MVP and users be damned. In other words, they kept moving the goalposts.
• Business users didn’t write their users stories in JIRA and instead used Confluence to track items.

Epilogue

After a year of trying to move towards Agile development, the Bank hired a new head of Middle Office Technology. He decided he didn’t need Project Managers to help him run the project. Soon after, he started using a product roadmap software that didn’t fully integrate with JIRA and then issued a decree that everyone in his organization would be part of a dev-ops organization. This meant he expected everyone to code, build, test, configure and deploy. In short, he didn’t think the organization should have a division of labor between developers, QA and tech leads. One person would be able to take on all three roles at once. This resulted in duplication of roles, some people feeling left out and emasculated and a general sense of helplessness.

How can we help?

Do you remember the old adage, ‘hindsight is 20-20’? In a large organization ruled by many fiefdoms, no matter how well-planned you think something may be, there are always intangibles and unknowns that can come into play. Even in the most progressive technology organization, organizational behavior is an unknown, where egos, skillsets and characters mix and blend in unpredictable ways. When you factor in that this was, and is, a very traditional organization, that hubris can be downright cancerous.

If you have experienced these challenges, or are facing a similar challenge, feel free to reach out and contact us at info@finservconsulting.com or 646-603-3799.

As we head into the new year, FinServ has been working with clients to develop Post Go-Live Workday project plans. To best prepare for 2019 your Workday team will need to develop a plan that includes additional functionality rollouts, annual system maintenance, and preparation for Workday’s system releases. FinServ has worked with clients to develop their post Workday Go-Live project plans, below are a few steps we recommend:

1. Start with your laundry list. It’s best to first hold a brainstorming session with your team to write down every Workday initiative including new functionality, system enhancements, maintenance, and data improvements that your team wants to accomplish both in the short term and the long term. We recommend assigning each task with an estimated duration for how many collective hours it will take your team to complete each task.

2. Identify which of these items require a business decision or further discovery. Oftentimes clients will put action items onto their plan that are unrealistic or end up not making sense for the business. For instance, if you want to leverage manager self-service, take the time to speak with your managers to make sure that they are interested in this functionality and have the bandwidth to train and test. Oftentimes an initiative like manager self-service  is put on the plan and it either gets pushed to be completed later on in the year or doesn’t happen at all because your team quickly discovers that the functionality won’t meet the manager’s requirements or the managers simply don’t have the time to dedicate to the initiative. Be selective as to which action items do make it onto the plan so that you set your team up for success. 

3. Don’t underestimate system maintenance. Anyone familiar with Workday knows that Workday requires a fair amount of daily maintenance. If you’re a growing firm your team will likely spend a big chunk of their time creating new bespoke roles, security groups, or segmented security for new members of your team. For example, you may have a new HR member join your team and you’d like to give them Workday that excludes visibility to your HR team’s Compensation data. This type of request would require a new role and a lot of testing before you’d be able to assign the role to the new user. There are also the semiannual releases that your team will need to plan around. Each semiannual release comes with many new features that need to be tested to make sure they don’t impact your Workday environment or have any impact on other integrated systems.

4. Get the business’s input. It’s important that this plan doesn’t just work for your Workday team but it works for your HR / Finance teams and the other department heads. Once you have a draft of your project plan sit down with other parts of the business to get their input. It is important that you have their support and oftentimes you may discover other use cases they may have for how their team can better leverage the system. 

5. Review annually. As you near year-end it’s important that your team reviews the plan and determines how successful they were at executing against the plan. It’s also important to track how accurate the plan was compared to what was accomplish throughout the year, you may be surprised by how many unexpected tasks came up throughout the year (one of our clients created more than 20 new security roles).  Once you’ve reviewed the plan it’s time to start the process all over again for the new year! 

To learn more about FinServ Consulting’s services, please contact us at info@www.finservconsulting.com or (646) 603-3799.

Finding qualified candidates who meet the requirements of the job description and compliment your company’s culture is becoming increasingly harder when you don’t have a system in place to logically work through a plethora of resumes being submitted via various venues. This alone is a difficult task, but even more-so when your firm is competing with others in the market. In some cases, firms do not have the capability to house a recruiting team internally, meaning this process quickly becomes a juggling act with employees’ day-to-day operations. Dealing with a manual recruiting process paired with other work responsibilities is a recipe for stunting your firm’s growth, either by missing out on high-caliber candidates due to lack of time focused on recruiting, or hiring ill-fit candidates by rushing through your candidate pipeline.

An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) can mitigate these risks and help your firm scale at its highest potential by automating your operational workflow and assisting your team with cumbersome tasks, but how?

Handle Larger Applicant Pools

Finding the best fit for your firm is a numbers game. Plain and simple. Not only should the candidate meet your desired skill set, but also should share the same drive and values aligned with your firm’s mantra. The ability to parse through large amounts of resumes in the screening stages ensures the candidates whom are passing through to the next stages are interview-worthy. With an Applicant Tracking System, utilizing pre-screening survey questions will allow you to automatically weed out candidates that do not meet your requirements. Setting this pre-screening questionnaire can also aid in prioritizing candidate interviews based on the score of the questionnaires so that your recruiting time is using their limited time to focus on the top candidates first.

Using Analytics to Your Advantage

Utilizing an Applicant Tracking System’s reporting and analytics functionality can paint a clear picture of your recruiting trends as to what is working. Whether your top candidates are coming from a specific university or have a niche background/skill set, analytics can allow you to focus on those recruiting efforts which are bringing your firm the best talent at all levels. Analytics can aid recruiters to understand when candidates are applying to jobs the most during the year so that they can anticipate the heavy rush and reach out to the business in advance to get the most up to date list of positions needed by the firm.

Creating recurring and one-off reports for management reporting is simplified with the ability to store report templates within the system, which are preset based on your reporting requirements and parameters.

Keep Worthy Candidates in Your Back Pocket

Often, the best candidates are the ones not available. Utilizing the talent pool functionality within an Applicant Tracking System can help your team keep track of those candidates who would be a great fit for the firm, but are not currently available, or your firm does not have availability at the time. Often the recruiting process is building a relationship with candidates so having a built in CRM “customer relationship manager” will help facilitate the tracking and communications with these candidates. These candidates can be bucketed into talent pools based on skill set, experience, or any other criteria desired which makes it easier to locate them and include them in campaigns.

The process ultimately begins with making sure the right system is chosen from the start so that you ultimately minimize your risk and create a smooth implementation and a faster adaption into your overall process. To learn more about FinServ Consulting’s services, please contact us at info@www.finservconsulting.com or (646) 603-3799.

If you get a sense of déjà vu when you see the headlines, no one would fault you. In a scene reminiscent of the 2008 subprime mortgage/CDO market, the CLO market has seemingly reached a frothy tipping point. Here’s the New York Times cautioning about the rise in CLO issuances. Here’s a Bloomberg article on AIG, no less, buying a credit manager specializing in CLOs. Here’s another Bloomberg article on a husband/wife-owned Kansas money manager that deals in CLOs. And yet another Bloomberg article on how everyone involved with CLOs gets rich. Even the actors are the same. Greg Lippman, former head of ABS trading at Deutsche Bank has acquired a CLO manager in his current role. And imagine – these links are just from the past two to three months – but you get the idea.

Business case for vendors

In the current low rate environment, investors are chasing yield, but they’re not the only ones. Everyone’s getting a cut of the pie, including CLO managers, structurers, lenders and software firms. This boom has meant an uptick in business for vendors we work with who help operationally manage these loans. This financial technology partner has grown by leaps and bounds in the past 3 years. Their client list reads like a who’s who of the world’s top credit/loan investors.

Vendors, quick to capitalize on a competitive advantage, have made investments into their portfolio management/trading/risk capabilities. Whether it comes from buying out a competitor with a built-in client base (see NEX Group, which started out as ICAP, who bought Traiana, but now lists the following as part of their extensive post-trade offering: Brokertec, TriOptima, Abide and Enso, among others) to investing/growing organically, the post-trade technology market has always been quick to partner with regulators, strategically-inclined to merge with competitors and eager to adopt new technologies in order to provide the best-in-breed offering.

The Trading Technology Landscape

Similar to the different flavors of derivatives that exist in the traded market today, the different capabilities needed to service a front office derivatives desk can include any or all of the following:

• Trade Capture
• Market/Reference Data
• Analytics
• Risk, in all its flavors – market, credit, counterparty,
• P&L
• Trade Support/Lifecycle Management
• Limits & Limit Management
• Regulatory – VaR, backtesting, counterparty credit risk, XVA
• Sales – pricing, structuring, MIS

There’s no one vendor that can supply all of this, but that’s not for want of trying. As I stated above, vendors are racing to complete their product suite with most, if not all, of the capabilities listed above. Some try and succeed; others don’t succeed and either get picked up at bargain bin prices or merge with a competitor.

The Bottom Line

The market works in cycles. Yesterday’s ABS/MBS is today’s CLO, which can lead to tomorrow’s next financial-engineered wonder product. Whether it’s a hedge fund looking for alpha on behalf of their investors, to money managers acting in the name of fiduciary responsibility on behalf of a municipality’s pension, they will opt to invest in new products or change their business workflows in response to some regulatory requirement. When that time comes, this will mean delivering technological change or effecting business process improvement. Replacing a new post-trade solution or implementing new workflows using a vendor product can seem daunting, but FinServ can help you efficiently plan for and implement these technologies to suit your unique firm needs. Our expertise in data, systems, and strategic consulting ensures that our clients receive tailored recommendations for the right post-trade solutions they need.

To learn more about FinServ Consulting’s services, please contact us at info@www.finservconsulting.com or (646) 603-3799.