Rule Financial, an independent provider of business consultancy, IT consultancy and IT services to the global investment banking community, today launches a paper outlining a new approach to help banks achieve increased operational efficiency.
Within global financial markets, year-on-year operational efficiency gains of 10-20% are rapidly becoming the industry standard. However, most organisations have already harvested the ‘low hanging fruit’ and are now finding it increasingly difficult to achieve their efficiency improvement targets. In light of this, in his new paper, ‘An accelerated agile approach to sustainable cost reduction’, Derek Perry (Specialist in Operational Processing and Design, Rule Financial) discusses how best to locate and harvest the ‘hidden fruit’ within the back office.
Amongst other things, the paper demonstrates how industry-wide regulatory reforms, such as EMIR, Dodd-Frank and Basel III, have necessitated a dramatic re-allocation of funds within financial institutions, adversely affecting the level of investment available for operational efficiency improvements. Furthermore, many of the most cost-effective and straightforward efficiency improvement methods have already been implemented. Perry is quick to point out that “standard approaches to improving operational efficiency concentrate largely on headcount reduction and moving operations to low-cost offshore locations. Although effective, these methods are limited in their scope and are ultimately unsustainable. In order for today’s Operations Managers to consistently deliver the operational efficiency improvements demanded of them, it’s clear that a fresh approach to operational efficiency is needed.”
The paper identifies that often, much of the information required to enable improvements in operational efficiency resides within existing documentation and with existing operational staff; the challenge is that they and the organisation rarely have the capacity or understanding of the techniques required to connect and utilise this knowledge. What may not be visible from within an organisation can be quickly identified from the outside, using a range of flexible and agile techniques to identify sustainable new efficiencies.
