Digital & Data Transformation

The rise of digital companies over the last two decades has forced traditional organisations to rethink their operating models to achieve the required levels of agility, customer experience, and flexibility. As the market is showing increased interest in digital assets, Start-ups and early investors have created enormous value in the unregulated cryptocurrency market, while businesses in the enterprise space have adopted technologies developed and tested in the market and applied them to payments and settlement, record keeping, securitisation, and trading.

New technologies are disrupting the way organisations and customers interact, empowering users to request better services and products.​ Organisations are facing both internal challenges to drive innovation and external competitive pressures to address market demands quickly.

A dedicated Supply Chain Finance company, sought to elevate the customer experience for their external clients accessing the trade finance system through their customer portal.

In this blog we explore the opportunities DeFi presents, including faster and cheaper payments, improved lending and borrowing, transparency, and accessibility. Following on the same trajectory, this also discusses how within the contemporary and rapidly evolving financial landscape, digital and data transformation  have become paramount for success

Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to the capability of a computer system to replicate human cognitive functions and simulate the reasoning that humans use to learn and solve problems by employing maths and logic. Machine Learning (ML), a subset or application of AI if you will, involves using mathematical models of data to facilitate computer learning without direct or explicit instructions.

The EU has set December 2024 as a critical milestone for organisations to establish the principles and practices to enhance ICT resilience across the financial sector.

TORI completed an 8-week engagement and collaborated closely with the Client’s internal IT, procurement / product owners, examining and constructively challenging the cost base, procurement practices and licence utilisation taking account of over overarching business objectives and desired cost savings targets.

The Society was undertaking an ambitious digital transformation programme that formed a core component of its long-term business strategy to attract new members.

The UK is preparing the ground to enter the world of digital assets. The Bank of England (BoE) has recently published a digital pound consultation paper related to digital currencies and exchanges, in line with actions taken by other European Countries, and in particular, EU member states (MICA).

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) related topics have been slowly but surely coming to the forefront of the global business agenda since the early 2010s. However, over the last few years, there has been a massive boost in interest pertaining to ESG considerations, with many organisations having ESG issues at the top of their risk register.

A newly appointed Global CIO wanted to conduct a strategic review of the global technology estate across the four main operating locations in APAC, USA and the UK.​

The phenomenal growth of AuM, revenue, and profitability for Asset Managers during the last decade has been reversed, driven by falls in stock market valuations across almost all asset classes impacting both management and performance fees.

Following on from an initial piece of work related to Vendor Cost Optimisation, the client needed further alignment with in-scope products to compile a robust execution plan across technology and business functions for the decommissioning of its legacy platforms. ​

Following aggressive M&A activity, the client one of the UK’s largest independent financial services companies encountered several issues.

Our Client had originally outsourced their backup service several years ago. The client now wanted to structure a new offering in the form of a managed service and issued an RFP to select a new supplier to deliver the desired backup model (BaaS).

The Society (as with other Financial Institutions) had been requested by regulators to improve its IT Risk and Control Frameworks relating to contract submissions.

A Global Investment Manager, and amongst the largest in the world with c£400 B of Assets under Management (AuM) had grown through multiple mergers and acquisitions. ​The client had been running a Cost Optimisation initiative for 3 years to reduce costs which failed to achieve its desired goals; they were seeking external expertise to help uncover deep-rooted issues.

One of the UK’s largest independent financial services companies operated as one company in name only. The Group consisted of pension administration companies, property legal services and a FinTech company all operating under different brands.

In light of the recent guidance established by the Consumer Duty act, a leading digital bank wanted to develop and enhance its internal governance around product management. The bank engaged TORI to assess the current state and build the processes and methodology to evaluate the risk component.

The Society established an ambitious plan to transform its view on data management and the technology stack that supports its operations. Senior stakeholders were concerned how the organisation would achieve those plans in the short to medium term. Our client requested TORI to perform an assessment of the IT Strategy Review to identify any potential risk or threats.

Our client required assistance migrating a 4,000 strong user base utilising Windows 7 and Office 2016 to Windows 10 and Office 365  Cloud environment (Outlook, OneDrive, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint and Teams).​

Data is everywhere. Data is powerful. Unprocessed data remains just that – data. At TORI we can help you turn your data into a valuable source of information and intelligence.

New technologies are disrupting the way organisations and customers interact, empowering users to request better services and products.

The client, a global exchange, has been experiencing substantial growth in recent years due to recent merger activities and, as a consequence, an increase in size and complexity of their delivery estate.

When it comes to implementing a digital transformation initiative, it is necessary to develop an integrated approach, in order to reduce operational challenges and to gain efficiencies.

The Client requested that TORI review their existing Software Asset Management (SAM) renewals process.

After an internal assessment, the client identified operational inefficiencies and gaps against regulatory standards for third-party management which posed a serious legal and reputational risk to the firm.

Throughout human history, society has seen the intangible concept of money manifest into various mediums. It is therefore only reasonable that one asks – what does the future hold for financial services?

The rise of digital companies over the last two decades has forced traditional organisations to rethink their operating models to achieve the required levels of agility, customer experience, and flexibility.

The pandemic has accelerated digital transformation across all industries (even faster than the CIO agenda), forcing organisations to quickly move key processes to digital environments to retain some level of activity during the disruption.

Towards the end of a highly-complex four-year transformation programme (£MMMs), several external audit and assurance reviews identified the need for greater focus around transition management.

The client needed to consolidate their Data Centre (DC) estate, optimise their application portfolio and relocate to new facilities.

As organisations attempt to maintain a level of productivity as the COVID-19 pandemic continues, working from home is the new reality for many businesses.

The client a European multinational Investment Bank and Financial Services Company, started a large global IT transformation programme early in 2016 with the goal of transforming 4,000 Applications and 104K servers/databases by 2023 onto cloud platforms.

Like many financial services organisations, our client has seen strong growth in the demand for analytics functionality.

The Client, located in London is heavily reliant on their parent group and an external Service Provider for a significant number of operational and strategic services with little or no cost transparency or operational value add. 

The client set out to reduce infrastructure and digital application run costs by identifying rationalisation efficiencies across previously disparate regions.

A critical component of the client Business strategy was to diversify their business, streamline and optimise their technology environment and adopt a fit for purpose Change control process.

Over two months TORI in conjunction with our partner designed the platform’s architecture and engineered a fully functional prototype of the target platform, implementing both the front-end and the back-end

An international FTSE-250 consumer finance business engaged TORI to develop a data strategy with the aim of ensuring regulatory compliance of their corporate data.

Our client was a Tier 2 Global Bank with a presence in 13 countries across the world and around 42,000 employees. As part of a contract review, the client asked TORI to review onshore and offshore application support and development services from a major Indian services vendor.

Our client was focused on a cost reduction strategy across its technology estate. Following on from our initial assessment, Storage was identified as a target area due to its ever-increasing cost profile.

Through the use of technology and innovative business models, FinTechs have triggered significant disruption in Financial Services. With such potential for disruption, it is always a good idea to scan ahead to see what may be around the corner.

The whole ethos and modus operandi for digital technology is in the capability to create digital products and services at a far reduced time to market; as compared to the more traditional approaches to technology services introduction.

Most IT Services managers generally believe they are doing a “good job”. That is until a long-term customer suddenly not wanting to do business with them any more and plans are underway to move to a new provider. At this point, it is perhaps too late to ask the customer whether there are any issues that need addressing or what requires improvement.

The Financial Services industry operates in an increasingly complex environment with relation to Information Lifecycle Governance. Organisations have historically been ineffective in managing the ever increasing volumes of data, driven in part by not applying effective records management procedures. 

Enterprise data volumes are growing exponentially. Legal and regulatory pressures have driven an approach that retaining data is a significantly more palatable solution than the risks associated with removing it. With storage always seen as relatively cheap, volumes have been allowed to grow. 

In the face of the never-ending deluge of bleeding-edge ‘solutions’ to address all business woes, how do you make sense of it all and more importantly, how do you determine the what, how and why?

AI is a general term which describes any technology that performs tasks which demonstrate characteristics of human intelligence. Machine learning is a subset of AI which can achieve ‘intelligence’ with the use of algorithms to ‘learn’ with data, without being explicitly programmed.

In the infrastructure, world storage has for many years been treated as an exception when it comes to cost. Its share of the IT Budget has historically been relatively small, and it has always appeared too hard to get a grip on: storage is complicated, it is difficult to have direct impact, and there are always other priorities.

IoT? AI? RPA? DLT? XYZ? Ok, we made the last one up… but the point is that IT leaders need to constantly assess the benefits of new technology in the context of the businesses they serve. Cloud strategy is no different. Which is better – private, public, hybrid or none at all?

In this age of rampant digitisation, there is a heavy focus on the Customer Experience (CX): Omni-channel strategies; customer-centric design; Single Customer View; frictionless customer experiences – just some of the concepts we read and hear so much about.

Chasing the pack is not always the right decision to make, as reaching ‘optimal’ in all dimensions may not necessarily maximise return on investment or justify the level of internal disruption required to get to that point.

A middle-eastern bank with regulated operations in the UK, Europe and the Americas embarked upon an operational remediation programme in response to some significant regulatory findings.

The TORI team have combined their significant experience and expertise in Wealth Management, Insurance and emerging technologies to look at the current digital capability across these industries.

Lengthy trade processing times meant the organisation suffered major incidents on a regular basis.

Our client a leading UK Investment & retail Financial Services firm faced numerous challenges around vendor governance, policies and process alongside a wider remit to reduce overall spending on IT by 20-30%.

TORI was engaged to implement a new group IT Target Operating Model for a leading FTSE-100 insurance company. 

A global FTSE 100 embarked upon an improvement plan to action process improvements and controls for access management of 70,000 distributed assets globally.

A Tier 1 global investment bank with clients in over 100 countries and assets of $2.3 trillion, wanted to identify a strategic partner to assist in the delivery of a standardised and highly virtualised technology platform and the operation of its core IT infrastructure services.

Currently, there are over 6 billion mobile subscriptions globally, (Sanou, 2011), and growing. Mobile technology is a booming business and will continue to excel.

A leading global hedge fund worked with TORI and our partner UI development and backend engineering team to redesign and redevelop a secure extranet and market simulation system. ​

A government organisation wanted to improve the consistency and objectivity of its customer care measurements.