IBS Journal July – August 2015


‘When you pick a partner for a project, they might know all the ins and outs of their software but what I want to


know is how they are going to help me with my P&L.’ Phil Griffiths, CIBC


units together and putting in a system that could fix the revenue leakage and intro- duce the relevant controls and supervision over the entire process, we could realise substantial value.’ Another problem at the time was that


business banking was split into standalone segments – for wholesale, mid-market, inde- pendent businesses and SMEs – and the data for these ‘was sitting on entirely different platforms’. The lower tiers had virtually zero data on their transactions, whilst upper tiers had a platform ‘which was not too bad, but by no means extensive and still missing data on a lot of transactions’, he recalls. ‘There was clearly a need to get a much stronger man- agement information system (MIS), analytics and billing solution in place.’ CIBC also wanted to be able to com-


pare its performance and activities to its competitors, and to align with the trends in the market. A comprehensive analytics solution was an important requirement, ‘so we could see if we change X, then how much it would affect Y, and so on, and present the findings to the board and top management.’ As all the price points were in disparate systems and some were done manually, it was a time, cost and resource intensive task to do this. And finally, the new management


brought the focus on customers to the fore. ‘At the time, we had very little data about our customers, and a lot of it was hopeless- ly out of date,’ Griffiths notes.


The way forward


The bank issued an RFP, which attracted a high response rate. A major requirement was for the new solution to be able to encompass as many


38


of the bank’s needs outlined above as pos- sible. Another important criterion was the supplier’s knowledge and understanding of the business. ‘When you pick a partner for a project, they might know all the ins and outs of their software but what I want to know is how they are going to help me with my P&L,’ Griffiths states. ‘How are they going to help me focus on the customers and deliver superior experience for them and not forget about the bottom line for us?’ The idea was to build one central-


ised data catalogue, where CIBC could see everything about its business customers (general data, transactions, accounts, prod- ucts and services they use etc). ‘Creating a centralised data mart was a clear benefit we wanted to achieve,’ says Griffiths. This would bring significant savings too, he adds, as ‘if I bring all my price points from all the legacy systems into one place, any changes can be done in a much cheaper project’. John Cowan, vice-president and


CIO, business banking technology at CIBC, explains: ‘Our architecture plan was straightforward. The platform interacts with the GLs and other relevant systems at the bank. The most challenging part, we realised, would be getting all the necessary data and bringing it together. Once we had that, putting Zafin on top would be easy.’ The project team held conversations


with many vendors, Griffiths recalls, and most of them promised to cover a specif- ic part of the project. ‘Zafin was the only company that said its solution would cov- er all the requirements. We were extreme- ly impressed.’ CIBC also liked the under- standing of the bank’s business that Zafin demonstrated, and that the software it offered was ‘out of the box’ already contain- ing the functionality CIBC required.


© IBS Intelligence 2015 www.ibsintelligence.com


‘Now we had a strong business case


and the right partner to drive the business forward,’ he remarks.


The outcome


‘We have recently finished the implementa- tion, and we are happy with our relation- ship with Zafin,’ states Cowan. ‘For a project like this one to be a success, you have to have the right technology partner.’ As mentioned above, the Zafin plat-


form sits on top of the core systems, with CIBC’s pricing and products ‘harmonised and uniformed’. There is now an auditable trail of changes and a set chain of com- mand for authorisation and supervision. ‘There is full accountability and a quick turnaround at the same time, so our cus- tomer service is not suffering,’ Griffiths says. There is also a lot more transparency


for customers, he adds. Previously, the bills were unclear but now clients have a com- prehensive view of the services they are getting and their billing charges. For the bank, there is continuity as it now has the full history of its interactions with a cus- tomer, so that if there is a charge increase, for example, CIBC can use that data to sup- port its decision and explain it to the cus- tomer. ‘On the whole, customers under- stand that and appreciate the transparen- cy,’ Griffiths observes. ‘We have reviewed the entire book of our business, and we would not have been able to do that with- out seeing the full picture.’ Zafin’s software has been ‘tightly inte-


grated’ with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, so that relevant pricing and billing informa- tion can be ‘pushed into the CRM platform’, he explains. This provides the bank’s sales teams and relationship managers with a


case study: cibc


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44