September 13, 2023
Business Reconfiguration at OWIN23: Insights from a panel discussion
Senior Marketing Content Creator
Reading time: 5 min
OWINTALK | BEHIND BUSINESS, BEYOND NEWS
In this lively panel discussion, industry experts and Objectway clients investigated the challenges and rewards associated with Business Reconfiguration.
What do firms want to achieve when it comes to business reconfiguration and what are the drivers in the first place? Are there broad industry wide themes or is each firm unique? And what are the considerations and processes to be included when it comes to successful reconfiguration? That was the focus of this panel discussion led by Stephen Wall, Founder of The Wealth Mosaic.
Joining the conversation on the stage of OWIN23 were prominent figures such as Mary Pieterse-Bloem, Head of Investment Office at Rabobank, Maarten De Clerck, Head of Product Development at KBC Securities Services, Davide Balladori, FSI Lead Italy at AWS and Paul Timmermans, Member of the Management Committee at Van Lanschot Kempen.
Get your migration done before you start any Innovation!
Panellists firstly thought that migrating technology was a first step with innovation on top of that following after. A key part of migration is moving into the cloud.
Our absolute first top priority right now is to do a migration of two key systems that are basically underpinning almost our entire infrastructure. We are moving everything into the cloud and moving to a set up that is a lot more modular. That will mean we can be flexible and adaptable and so then we can start our innovation process.
– Mary Pieterse-Bloem, Head of Investment Office at Rabobank
She emphasised the focus on the client servicing part to be personal and relevant and to be there for your client when there is a need, together with the importance of creating a symbiosis between the human and the digital part.
From 2015 we have had a strategy to become a cloud user. The drivers were scalability, speediness and efficiency in terms of everyone working from the same platform. We have since added sustainability into the list of drivers. We have been taking systems – CRM system, a core banking system, portfolio management system and so on – one by one and moving into the cloud.
– Paul Timmermans, Member of the Management Committee at Van Lanschot Kempen
In terms of the leading drivers that organisations encounter, Davide Balladori, FSI Lead at AWS also shared his perspective.
It depends! – he affirmed – You may want to be agile, you may want to save costs, or you may have a contract that is coming to an end and you need to empty your data centre because you simply no longer have the contract. But the important thing to remember is that migration is an organisational project, so both the business and the people have to be on board. It has to be operational and organisational.
Partnership means building together
Moving into the cloud obviously means working with new business partners and providers, but the real question is how to make an outsourcing or partnership relationship really work wonders.
I think you need to make your internal collaborators aware that change is afoot and really actively prepare for a successful collaboration. That could mean taking your internal experts to the partner to sit together and work through all the various complexities.
– Maarten De Clerck, Head of Product Development at KBC Securities Services
It was thought that although the beginning of the contractual relationship can sometimes be a bit more sensitive, once a partnership gets going and trust has been established, the sharing of experience and expertise is a natural step to making the most of a partnership.
Trust is so important in a strategic relationship. If the vendor does not work to gain trust, and does not understand the needs and objectives of the project then it’s less likely to succeed, added Timmermans
Indeed there is an element of shared risk and that needs to be acknowledged by both parties for an optimal relationship and best outcomes. Being aware of potential challenges is also crucial.
Pieterse-Bloem comments:
One of the biggest challenges is the regulatory part because the regulator has a habit of flooding us with wave after wave after wave of regulation. Secondly, it’s the strategic choice of what to outsource and what to keep in house, and there the opinions tend to differ between the business side and IT side. Thirdly you have to deal with compliance, which gets really uneasy about sending big amounts of client data outside of the bank and back, so there is a lot of convincing to do. And fourthly, if you decide to outsource you have to run a beauty parade. But I personally do see a lot of benefits with outsourcing. Anything that anybody outside of your organization can do better. You should outsource in my view.
From that perspective having an iterative process where there is trust between the vendor and the wealth manager and where the development processes ensures that everything remains safe and completely closed up, a shared responsibility model, is key.
This is something that can be incorporated into a big RFP but is trickier when working with third-parties on a project-by-project basis, adding in specific APIs to solve a particular pain point – as is popular in a model of ecosystems and components.
Bringing together two entities is another challenge as is the case with Van Lanschot Kempen and Mercier Mercier Vanderlinden. Timmermans explained:
We are a bank so they have to adapt to the banking standards. And that’s a challenge. Because you don’t want to lose the success of both entities. They are also coming with a low cost/ income ratio whereas ours is higher and the aim is to bring that together and to reduce that cost of income overall.
Indeed the panel thought that having a clear idea of the business as it looks now and what it will look like once the transformation has occurred is the crucial starting point. As important is how that will evolve going forward rather than starting from scratch again and again.
De Clerck commented:
Once that is done you just have to go ahead and be prepared to do the work and put your mind to it with the right internal culture and buy in and the right external partners, that would be my take on this.
Planning for evolution and having a clear roadmap a firm can essentially enable its own future for the short, medium, and long term – as well as build in flexibility within those margins of time.
Ultimately success comes back round the soft factors like having buy in from the top right down to the most junior of staff – communication and involvement at every stage so that everyone understands the objectives and their part in that were considered as important as the actual project itself.
