These challenges are not new. Certainly, improving risk management has been at the top of management agenda for years. However, the latest challenge is to balance these issues in a changing environment—from a mode of consolidation and cost reduction to focus on growth. Revenue growth is the primary driver of shareholder value, yet this time around, the industry’s growth objectives are tempered by a continuing focus on cost containment.

To achieve sustainable growth, financial services companies must tie product innovation to process and service innovation. Customers look for innovations such as new ways to improve efficiency and customer service, which is often difficult to find in their financial service providers. Endeavor towards such innovation generally requires new strategies, new tools, and new processes.

The path to innovation and high performance

EXL can help your organization achieve the innovation capabilities that lead to higher customer satisfaction, faster revenue growth, and stronger earnings. We examine your existing strategies, tools, and processes to identify areas of improvement and develop solutions that will help you enhance overall performance levels. These solutions include:

BUSINESS PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

Business performance management (BPM) is the practice of enabling organizations to translate strategies into plans, monitor execution, and improve financial and operational performance through increased insight. It has become a critical corporate mandate due to heightened concerns with corporate governance and accountability. Based on the concept that “what gets measured gets done,” BPM helps management focus on those activities that will ultimately increase shareholder value.

BPM capability is quickly becoming a necessity for doing business. Timely and accurate information is a key to success in the current environment. Increased regulation, particularly the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, has also created a sense of urgency to use BPM to obtain a single version of an organization’s financial status and implement real-time financial controls that can protect shareholder value.

EXL can help you effectively integrate BPM across your organization to obtain benefits such as enhanced decision making, real-time financial controls, timely reports on cost and profitability levels, achieve cost effectiveness through right shoring, and agility in responding to market changes.

		Our financial services industry specialists can help you design and development of performance and profitability information and reporting,
		develop tools to effectively measure and monitor costs, and
		implement level appropriate metrics and measures to drive profitability and performance.

COST MANAGEMENT AND ACTIVITY BASED COSTING

Increased focus on cost management provides companies the necessary competitive edge to operate effectively in a complex global environment. The key to success is aligning the business and operational strategies in a cost effective manner. A fair understanding of the interaction between the products and various services a company offers along with the related costs is crucial to a winning strategy. This eventually means that companies need to foster an environment of continuous improvement through a sustained and effective cost
management process, better understanding of the cost structures in addition to their variability and their links to products, customers, and channels.

EXL can work with your organization to develop an effective cost management and measurement framework that provides an integrated view of costs related to customers, products, services, and channels. Our practitioners have the functional knowledge of cost/ activity based management and the financial industries. We develop and implement timely solutions through the use of process analysis and activity based costing methods. We can also integrate these methods with your ongoing management reporting and performance management tools.

ENTERPRISE RISK MANAGEMENT

EXL’s Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) is a structured approach to aligning strategy, processes, people, technology, and knowledge to identify and manage uncertainties and risk. It provides a comprehensive and integrated framework that enables organizations to proactively manage business risk. ERM achieves balance between business needs and risk thresholds to increase competitive advantage.

EXL will work closely with you to develop a risk management framework that supports value creation. It helps management assess future events and respond in a manner that reduces the likelihood of outcomes that could lead to value erosion. In addition, we assist in developing and implementing measurement and monitoring processes to support ERM. The real benefit of ERM is realized when organizations looks beyond meeting minimum regulatory requirements and seek a higher value proposition in their frameworks. For instance, an integrated approach can provide cost savings for compliance and improve the estimation of capital requirements. In addition, the board and senior management can review issues and opportunities to proactively manage risk rather than react to unexpected ones.

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

Business Intelligence can help companies turn their data into reliable and fresh information that continually updates the performance forecast. By integrating data, reporting and analysis with the sustaining infrastructure, BI improves decision making, enhances knowledge creation, and provides increased value and visibility to the organization.

Financial services firms usually have at least one type of BI solution. But they rarely realize the full benefits of the tool(s). These solutions often fail to deliver the value they promise because of challenges in coordinating business requirements with technological capabilities.

EXL can work with you to become a high performing organization where information is used for competitive advantage. We help bridge the gap between the capabilities supported by your BI solution’s current and desired states through the assessment of your culture, capabilities, and infrastructure across key competency areas thereby increasing your return on investment. We will work with your business and finance executives to effectively identify measures to manage performance, utilize, implement technology solutions to foster an environment of continuous improvement, and facilitate its integration as part of your organization culture to enhance shareholder value.

For more information please contact
Sridhar Kadaba,
Vice President and Head of Value Added Services
at (212) 624- 5922; email: sridhar.kadaba@exlservice.com