Finance / Case studies

Established stock exchanges of the world have been forced to transform from an environment where there was little or no competition, due to high regulatory barriers of entry, to one of increasing competition and much lower entry requirements.
Many established exchanges are also facing increased competition from alternative trading systems. What hasn’t changed is the stellar expectations of investors, now hungry to recoup any losses they suffered in the global financial crisis.

The New Zealand Automobile Association (NZ AA) used to send some 400,000 letters to prospective customers for its insurance business AA Life each year. The call centre would then follow up those letters with a phone call.
Two years ago, NZ AA deployed business analytical tools from SAS that identified which customers would most likely respond to such a campaign, and sent the letters to this group. As a result the volume of marketing mail has been greatly reduced, along with the number of follow up calls by call centre agents. Moreover, response rates have improved by more than 50 per cent and even doubled, says Mark McCabe, senior marketing manager for NZ AA.

The offshore captive centre was once the Holy Grail of offshore outsourcing. As companies got a taste of the cost savings possible by outsourcing IT and business process work to lower cost countries, they began to salivate over the thought of bypassing the offshore vendors (and their pesky profit margins) altogether and saving even more money by setting up their own service shops in India.
But today, those offshore captive centres have become drain on many of the companies that created them - so much so that some organisations are desperate to divest themselves of their offshore units.

Technology will transform organisations over the next five years, with the challenge for New Zealand business being to ensure their core systems are stable, flexible and up to the task.
As well, CEOs and boards of directors must be convinced of the need to replace legacy systems so staff can work more efficiently — a daunting task that is still considered a potential career breaker for CFOs and CIOs.

Rob Reeg took over as president of MasterCard's Global Technology and Operations in May 2008, the de facto chief of IT at the US$4 billion credit-card and electronic payment provider.

The pressure is on the finance team. As the costs of basic components such as oil and food continue to spiral up the production chain, just about every industry is under increased pressure to keep profits up. For the front line that means increasing sales. But for the back office it is all about keeping costs under control - a discipline that falls firmly into the chief financial officer's realm.
In an era of higher commodity prices, companies are revisiting their approach to budget control. Cost cutting in the past was often reactive - bad profit results produced the shears - now companies are making cost-cutting a part of their cultures and a constant exercise.

It was a normal Monday batch process at a well-respected global bank - until, that is, a critical back-office system failed. At first, IT administrators took it in stride. This wasn't the only time they'd had to recover lost data. But soon it became clear something more ominous was occurring: the bank's multi-terabyte database had become corrupted.
The administrators tried to switch to the hot offsite backup. No luck: it had mirrored the corruption. In the IT world, the situation was beginning to spell 'crisis'. Applications teams and anyone else who could help had to suspend all priorities to focus on the failure. Despite best efforts, the target recovery time - four hours - came and went without a clue as to the problem's root cause or fix.