Problem
A leading Global Retail and Investment bank wanted to review the technology for its European securities services business to assess the sustainability of their ecosystem in light of planned growth. The aim was to collate the positives and challenges faced by the service owners, internal users and customer facing staff. The firm enlisted Synechron to conduct a thematic infrastructure review and propose recommendations across four focus areas:

• Review of ‘As-Is’ IT Infrastructure
• Impact of Growth
• IT Operating Ecosystem
• Data Quality and Metrics (SLAs, KPIs, etc.)

Solution
A seasoned Synechron team of technology and business consultants designed a review methodology covering these thematic areas with the focus on identifying key challenges across the IT ecosystem. The aim was to ensure that the review would be qualitative and recommendations measurable with factual assessments that would yield actionable insights. Synechron wanted to ensure that while the assessment was to be at the enterprise level it would yield a micro-level health status analysis per system, whilst tracing the thematic issues across product and service lines at the macro level. The thematic review report was created and presented to the bank’s European management committee and the recommendations made were adopted for further planning and execution. The review report included:

• Individual System Health Status against each of the four thematic areas
• Overarching themes of the review (good and bad)
• State of the Nation summary
• Independent Synechron statement
• Key recommendations, challenges, and limitations

Highlights

• The framework assessment provided an independent system health status review for 36 applications across five product groups, identifying the key issues and challenges at a micro level
• The Synechron report also included a health status review to assess the thematic issues at a product level
• The report ties back all issues across the IT landscape based on the level of intensity and risk of each issue to help quantify and prioritize resolutions
• Problems were tracked through to identify the root causes and these were then mapped against one or more recommendation areas to help provide a holistic picture
• Actionable intelligence provided on-point recommendations and quantification of key risk areas identified