Global Financial Services Provider

This global financial services provider ensures client asset appreciation through meticulous fund and portfolio management. Its offerings include fund services, environmental social and governance (ESG) solutions, digital banking, and management company services.

Its growth strategy focuses on mergers and acquisitions (M&As) and it has expanded its global presence with over 13,000 employees in 112 offices across 38 countries. Using enterprise architecture for strategic guidance, this financial services provider has created a unique ability to support major C-level decisions, strategic transformation programs and audit processes with holistic insights and architecture designs.

Why standardizing enterprise architecture was critical

The IT division, comprising approximately 600 experts, has been formed through a succession of global M&As. Support centres are located in South Africa, Belgrade, and Ireland. The enterprise architecture team, comprising four architects, initially focused on supporting product development, assessing its value and ensuring its strategic alignment with business goals.

The team had access to an enterprise architecture tool previously utilized by an acquired company in its portfolio, but wanted to refine its application portfolio. The team also used drawing tools such as PowerPoint, Word, LucidChart, and diagrams.net. This led to a lack of uniformity in modeling, resulting in inconsistencies and a disjointed view of the architecture.

The team subsequently decided to standardize its modeling using the ArchiMate and TOGAF frameworks. It started working with Bizzdesign Horizzon because the enterprise architecture tool comes pre-configured with several built-in metamodels like ArchiMate in native implementation. It also can communicate complex details in an accessible format. The team could reserve the intricate technical details for the IT department while presenting clear, actionable insights to stakeholders.

How the financial services provider is using enterprise architecture for operational growth

The team envisioned how it wanted to roll out enterprise architecture. First, it wanted to answer the question: “In which country are we providing which business capabilities?”
To better understand its global operations, the enterprise architecture team, in collaboration with Bizzdesign, created a Capability World Map. It used a business architecture method of business capability mapping to plot its services against global office locations. It presented insights to the CEO through business-appealing visualizations such as Management Dashboards and Landscape Maps. This was built upon a robust model to keep the different visualizations based on the same data.

This exercise was a first for the company and revealed its operational reach and countries where its  services were not yet available. It also played a role in the CEO’s strategic decisions on whether to grow by expanding existing offices or purchasing new ones, balancing the cost-effectiveness and coverage of its product offerings.

Moreover, the team designed its as-is architecture, which had become diverse and complex due to numerous M&As. It began to model its IT setup for regulatory audits and to better understand the relationships between different applications and systems. This initiative helped it to anticipate the impact of changes within its IT environment, improve project coordination across various teams, and address technology obsolescence by analyzing end-of-life support from vendors.

Successes from the enterprise architecture team

The team has achieved significant milestones in its enterprise architecture efforts:

Data-driven M&A decision-making gives a competitive edge
The team has gained visibility into its global business operations, understanding where business is conducted and the nature of these activities. In terms of decision-making for mergers and acquisitions, the ability to map out and analyze its global business capabilities has provided the financial services provider with a distinct edge.

The team can now support strategic decisions with data, weighing expansion costs against new acquisitions with greater precision. This insight has enhanced its strategic planning, allowing the business to estimate costs more accurately and identify the most cost-effective paths for expansion. In collaboration with Bizzdesign, it has demonstrated that enterprise architecture plays a pivotal role in supporting C-level with data-driven decision-making.

Standardized modeling and preconfigured templates ensure rapid results
By adopting a native ArchiMate implementation, it seamlessly migrated existing architecture content, which has proven beneficial, particularly for regulatory audit processes.

The team has also established a standardized language that lays a solid foundation, enabling scalability and expansion. By reusing templates in Bizzdesign Horizzon, the team has gained quick insights on technology vendor support, enhancing efficiency. These practices have been instrumental in setting the stage for the team to be acknowledged for contributing to organization-wide transformation and digitization efforts.

Single data repository speeds up regulatory audit processes
The enterprise architecture tool has become an integral part of the organization’s regulatory strategy, as it holds a complete repository of the company’s data flows, workflows, interlinks, relationships, models, etc.

This financial services provider can now construct customized views, showing exactly what’s required without extraneous details. This can revolutionize its audit processes, offering auditors direct access to the necessary data without assistance and reducing the time and resources typically required for audit preparation.