We had an important meeting scheduled for over a month to kick off our biggest technology project investment in 40 years - a full system modernization. Our C-level executives including the CIO, COO, and CFO, along with our directors from wealth management, life and pension insurance, and call center departments, attended the meeting. The CIO also invited some of our chief architects and developers to represent the technology side.
To make the most of our time, the CIO organized a short one-hour meeting with a clear agenda focused on two topics: 1) mapping our solution landscape in wealth, pension, and life insurance, and 2) defining alternatives to our existing solutions. Thankfully, our IT department had already documented our solution landscape in detail with versions and release history, making it easy to solve the first point.
However, we faced a challenge with the second point, as our company had mainly worked with two vendors for decades, one for wealth management and the other for life and pension insurance, and we lacked a good understanding of the solution landscape. Luckily, one of our architects from life and pension insurance was familiar with VendorMatch Discovery, an online directory for financial services technology solutions, and demonstrated how the tool could help us filter relevant solutions.
“What I like with this Celent tool is the ability to pick high-level filters for specific categories of solutions to refine the long list of solutions,” he mentioned. Mirroring his laptop browser to the conference room screen, he showed the example of front and middle office wealth management systems, picked a few solutions, and added them to a project. He repeated the process for the life and pension policy administration system.
Our CIO was positively surprised that his agenda items could be satisfactorily dealt with in about 30 minutes, suggesting, “Well, now that we have managed to deal with points 1. and 2., shall we use the rest of our time to think about how to prioritize alternatives and define the next steps?”
“There is no better way to start a risky and ambitious transformation project than with plenty of relevant information to help guide the decision process,” he added!
Today, VendorMatch Discovery was able to provide alternative solutions within a short time and progress the meeting forward. Move past the research phase quickly and use VendorMatch Discovery’s high-level filtering to identify a list of potential partners. Get in touch with us today for a demo.
