Solutions for financial service providers and project management

The core task of financial service providers’ IT/organizational units is to ensure the medium- and long-term supply (development and operation) of institutions with adequate, economical and future-proof organizational and IT solutions. While process management methods have now reached a high level of maturity on the business side, linking the business process landscape and the corresponding technical system landscape still represents a major challenge.

The missing connection between business and IT can be addressed in particular by means of integrated further development, consisting of enterprise architecture management as the necessary framework combined with proven methods from process and data management. These methods also form the basis for technical implementation in terms of application development or customizing of standard software.

At the same time, the approaches to efficient process and data management are currently still subject to dynamic developments. Now that the technical and organizational foundations have been laid with the introduction of Basel II and the associated data consolidation solutions, the requirements for documentation, traceability and data quality are increasing considerably. For example, BCBS#239 “Risk Data Aggregation” sets out comprehensive expectations for the processes and data management of systemically important banks. Although large parts of the IT landscape at financial service providers are now covered by standard software, there is still a considerable amount of application development work involved in implementing systems. In addition to customizing and integrating standard software, specific components usually have to be added individually in order to secure existing competitive advantages or generate new ones.

Most of these are bank management applications (accounting, controlling, regulatory reporting, risk management including data warehouses), as this is where the specific business models require a high degree of individuality. On top of that, these applications are impacted by external requirements, mainly due to the increasingly dynamic development of regulation. Last but not least, market trends such as big data and cloud computing are intensifying competition.

Module content

Designing FSI solutions – data and process management

• Ensuring data supply and data management in companies
• Basics of data structures and data modeling
• Approaches to data warehousing and business intelligence
• Integrated performance and risk management – from a data management perspective
• Basics of data quality management and metadata management
• Basics of business process management in the context of banking
• Effective process management – paper tiger or management instrument
• Brief presentation of common methods and tools (zeb proGAM, ERM, EPKs, ARIS)
• Critical success factors and discussion of needs and benefits

Plan, design, build – application development today

• A look at the success and failure of IT development projects
• Process models for application development (waterfall, V-model, Scrum)
• Organization and roles in software development, e.g. architect, implementer, designer, tester
• Documentation, e.g. business concept, IT concept, IT design, IT architecture, interface specification, interface contract