A journey from customization to standardization

For decades, SimCorp has been known for delivering “haute couture” solutions for its clients by customizing each implementation to fit all business requirements on its front-to-back investment management solution, SimCorp Dimension^®. Each client wanted their own fully customized solution fitting their dedicated business processes according to the specific wishes of all their internal and external stakeholders. That’s about to change.

In recent years, the market has experienced drastic transformations. From a technology perspective, there is a move towards ASP, Cloud and SaaS solutions based on subscription models. From a business perspective, the historically low interest rates, increased regulatory compliance and request for more transparency in charging structures have triggered the need for wealth and investment managers to improve their profitability and find important efficiency gains in their overall value chain.

Although business and regulatory requirements are becoming even more complex, there is a trend towards simplification and standardization of core business processes and functions in the buy-side industry target operating model. And this is true across all segments, from the biggest investment firms to the smallest niche player boutiques. In other words, problems can be complex, but solutions cannot.

In this context, competition is becoming fiercer and time-to-market for investing in new asset classes, delivering new financial products and developing new differentiating services through digitalization matter considerably to develop customer loyalty, capture market-share and grow.

SimCorp has deeply considered this demanding situation and has developed a new standardized delivery model of SimCorp Dimension with SimCorp Standard Platforms™. This new offering aims to simplify the lives of our clients with more standardized solutions as a recommended baseline, but still with the opportunity to customize specific configurations when required by the business. The new methodology helps to increase our clients’ profitability margins by working effectively on bringing cost and risk down, while simultaneously increasing revenue generation with faster time-to-benefit of new initiatives.

How do we achieve high business value, risk mitigation and cost reduction?

There are several ingredients that play a significant role.

First, SimCorp Standard Platforms enable clients to work through proven solutions and workflows that facilitate adoption, accelerate the decision-making process and mitigate project risks throughout the whole project lifecycle.

Second, a value-based delivery approach focusing on market needs and aiming to increase velocity of each project step has been developed:

• From scope clarification with the target operating model in mind;
• Working with predefined business processes as a baseline for the design;
• Continuing with cost effective assembly of “on the shelf” standardized solution components;
• Adding customization where required to meet specific business needs;
• Closing with testing and validating delivery drops enabling early business involvement.

The need for client resources is greatly reduced allowing them to focus on value-adding activities rather than on running projects.

Third, working with standardized solutions offers various important benefits in the day-to-day business after the initial project has gone live. Among others, we can think of at least five:

1. Readiness and richness of business requirements support covering not only functionalities or features but the entire process flow;
2. Effortless system upgrades becoming routine;
3. Higher users’ satisfaction due to improved quality;
4. Less defects and thus less usage of first line support;
5. Flexibility to evolve the platform with easy adoptions of existing and coming pre-packaged solutions triggered either by execution of business strategy or compliance to regulatory changes.

Now what elements accelerate time-to-market?

The combination of most of the above categories of benefits have a direct impact on the shortening timeline of the implementation of SimCorp Dimension allowing a faster return on investment and giving the possibility to reallocate more resources on revenue-generating work. We deliberately used the “lean thinking” to determine value-adding activities and resources and eliminate waste in the deployment model of SimCorp Dimension. It starts from early-stage solution buying cycle where tools and methodologies are already used as a red thread to guide potential clients in their selection process and budget estimation. Moreover, we have scaled our offering to reduce the amount of customization needed during the project stage to a minimum bringing down implementation man-days considerably and thus delivery time.

As a conclusion, SimCorp Standard Platforms creates a competitive edge and helps you achieving notable profitability margin gains through offering faster delivery and higher business value with lower risk while maintaining high quality in implementation projects. The model offers you the best of both worlds combining the full flexibility of SimCorp Dimension with a set of standardized solutions fitting most used business practices, in other words, you can still love “haute couture” and have a strong preference for “prêt-à-porter”!

If you’d like to learn more, watch the below video explaining our new offering further on and get in touch.