Project 3: Large European Financial Services Group
The client is one of the largest financial services groups in Europe. This project needed to serve several organisations within the group, with the objective of building a new multi-company system for supporting customer management, new business acquisitions and portfolio administration. The project had several complex factors that needed to be taken into account: the involvement of several vendors and consulting firms, distributed across multiple physical locations; the development of a single system to support requirements from several independent companies, address diverse business needs, support different delivery channels and integrate multiple legacy environments; a non-traditional approach to model the system both during the functional and technical analysis; and tightly integrating both advanced and traditional technologies to deliver a complex system.An Accenture group of expert resources was involved with this project from the beginning, assisting client managers in coordinating the most critical activities on the project and supervising the conceptual, functional and technical design.Accenture also supported the client in implementation activities in selected areas, particularly in building the technical architecture of the system.
The system is designed to cover customer management, acquisition and administration of retail financial products sold through various channels.From the architectural side, the system features a structured approach with strict independence between data, business logic and presentation layers.
The project team organisation was very complex due to the high number of subcontractors and suppliers involved. In total, there were over 100 people on the team.The Accenture local office consultants were heavily involved in the functional analysis and design, whereas consultants from the Sophia Antipolis office led the technology side. This included designing and implementing the integrated development and runtime architecture, as well as coordinating technical activities on the project (such as integration with other/existing systems).
The new system brought a greater level of effectiveness in customer management, such as better customer insight and product deployment (e.g. decreased time to market for new products). In addition, higher efficiency was achieved through better and more comprehensive support of administration processes as well as exploiting IT implementation and operation synergies across many companies.The technical architecture was later adopted as the standard intranet architecture for the entire client group. Several applications were ported to it.