Digital 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.

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).

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.​

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Heraclitus once wrote, ”The only constant in life is change.”  No truer statement has been made, and this is equally applicable to strategic enterprise-wide transformations, which are no longer an option but a business imperative to remain competitive.

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.

The Financial Stability Report, published by The Bank of England in July 2021,  presented the Financial Policy Committee (FPC) view that additional policy measures are required to mitigate financial stability risks for Financial Service companies using Cloud service providers.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.