Sticklr

Over the last 15 years, providers of financial services products e.g. Pensions and ISAs, have moved away from traditional product focussed, legacy systems for administering their customers policies to holistic multi-product investment Platform technologies. This move has taken place across multiple sectors including insurance companies, banks and asset managers (the ‘Providers’ of the Platforms).

The decision to move to has 2 main drivers: cost reduction and an enhanced digital experience for the end customer (which also provides a competitive advantage through propositional enhancement).  In most cases Providers have opted to outsource the technology solution to third party firms, who provide the underlying software that powers these Platforms.  Platforms typically provide a very user-friendly experience that is straightforward and clean, allowing customers a streamlined journey: from joining the Platform, to buying products and executing underlying transactions to retiring –  belying the complexity that sits behind the user experience.

The technologies that drive these Platforms are by their very nature complex, with multiple dependencies, third party links and bespoke configurations to ancillary systems – all overlain with technical jargon used to describe the processes and tasks that lead to the customer experience. This is where the problem lies. The business users within the Providers are typically not from a technical background, rather they are accountants, project managers, Compliance professionals, operational specialists and marketeers. This brings about a disconnect, where the customer at the beginning and often at the end of a multiple year project may not actually understand how the Platform works. This situation is particularly difficult in highly regulated markets, such as the UK, where there is a regulatory requirement for responsible Senior Managers to understand their businesses in detail and be able to provide evidence that the business is operating correctly, whether the technology has been outsourced or not.

To address this disconnect, the Provider typically hires a specialist consulting firm to run implementation programmes, ‘translating’ the technical aspects into business language. The consulting firm will bring in a large team of analysts to understand the Providers’ requirements and will act as a proxy in discussions with the software supplier. In turn the consulting firm will often appoint a test outsourcer, which involves recruiting a very large number of (often offshore) resources to prove the platform is working as expected. The issue is, neither the consulting firm or the test firm truly understand the technology or processes they are testing. This results in the adoption of a methodology where they simply test vast quantities of data without actually being able to articulate to the software provider the underlying issues that need to be resolved. This leads to lengthy delays and misunderstandings that can often strain the relationships between the software firm and the Provider.

Sticklr have seen these symptoms manifest themselves first hand.  Through the use of technology we will deliver, in business language, a set of visually oriented documents that articulate the entire capability of the Platform, linking the relationships that exist, providing evidence of the completeness of testing against these capabilities and producing documentary evidence to satisfy the regulatory requirements of the FCAs Senior Managers Regime and Operational Resilience.

We will also rapidly identify the consequences of subsequent propositional and regulatory change, identifying all the processes and tasks that are affected. This will allow for cost effect management of change.

To provide this service we are bringing together several business functions, in particular Enterprise Architecture, Business Analysis, Regulatory Compliance, and automated testing. These functions generally work in isolation at different stages of the business development lifecycle and use separate tools.

From a regulatory perspective this will allow businesses to have the ability to:

• produce and update business process diagrams in real time based on test execution data
• trace dependencies through the process diagrams to produce real time business dashboards for Senior Managers and Compliance staff
• create and execute tests which, the Compliance teams, business users and the technical teams can find, view and understand
• electronically monitor regulations to identify and analyse changes