Back office administration outsourcing company, FinSource, has strengthened its IT infrastructure to support a number of service initiatives to the financial market.
According to FinSource IT strategy manager, Richard Freeman, the enhanced service represents a transformation in the administrative processes of financial houses from a non-value-add function to an offering that can contribute significantly to reducing risk and freeing clients to focus on customer-facing services. Currently FinSource manages the back office administration of R35 billion in assets and R8,5 billion in unit trusts.
The administrative functions of financial service providers tend to be neglected in terms of technology, as budgets have been devoted largely to customer-facing services, Freeman maintains. "Because back office technology has tended to lag, it has pushed up the overall cost of financial administration and has been a restricting factor in increasing companies` competitiveness. Reconciliations may not be up to date, and current information may not be readily available. Under these circumstances a company and its customers may find themselves at risk.
"Fast response, system reliability and business continuity are therefore vital to an effective, responsive and reliable administration function, and were also the driving factors in enhancing our IT infrastructure," continues Freeman. "We opted for an Intel server solution as it allows cost-effective redundancy and gives us the ability to dedicate a server per client. In this way, clients have faster access to their systems." Computer Configurations supplied rack-mounted servers, holding four servers per rack. Each rack is attached to an Orca high capacity data storage solution. Clients are linked to FinSource via diginet lines, and FinSource is connected to the Swift international currency clearing network.
The entire infrastructure was implemented by Services Configurations. Business continuity and disaster recovery services are to be provided by Business Recovery Services from its Bellville centre. All companies are part of the CCH group.
The open environment now paves the way for FinSource to add to its service offering. "Customers now enjoy an efficiently run administrative function at a significantly lower cost per transaction than they would incur if they ran the system in-house," says Freeman. "Just as our clients minimise risk in their business, so FinSource has reduced the risk in its service offering to a negligible level, while adding to its client`s value proposition by reducing the cost of administration."
Share