Industry Overview - Financial Services

Consolidation and increased regulation have brought a new set of challenges for financial institutions looking to remain competitive in a rapidly-changing market. In addition to communicating and collaborating across new corporate divisions and functions, corporate managers are challenged with looking across disparate legacy systems, some inherited through acquisition, to achieve a consolidated view of risk, financial health, budget targets and other key performance indicators. It is no surprise, then, that financial institutions have looked to Microsoft SharePoint to provide a stable foundation for collaboration, presentation and business process coordination since it is common across all departments and, by legacy standards, is incredibly economical. To derive full benefit from SharePoint and deploy solutions quickly without programming, major financial institutions are also turning to Bamboo solutions as their essential toolkit. Using Bamboo's extensive portfolio of components, these global firms can quickly deploy and support applications to address some of the following common business functions:

• Customer onboarding
• Customer surveys and satisfaction management
• Financial data integration, reporting and dash boarding
• Issue and correspondence tracking
• Business workflows and approvals
• Enterprise calendar and alerts management
• Enterprise knowledge base management

Solutions Brief - Loan Operations and Credit Approval

One of the key challenges faced by a major bank was collaborating on the approval process for credit applications. Sharing of customer-and application-specific information with appropriate users was a challenge given the large amount of document-based data that needed to be collected. The bank was interested in what could be done with SharePoint out-of-the-box, or with third-party components that would help in centralizing access to information, improving decision making workflows, and allow for secure communication. The firm determined that with SharePoint as the foundation and Bamboo as the functional layer, a solution could be quickly deployed to address all of their needs while being extremely cost effective. They were particularly impressed by Bamboo's ability to bring visibility and accountability to task management - a factor that greatly increased overall productivity.

As a result of this solution, the client is able to deploy customer-specific workflows for credit approval and has the ability to "roll up" a consolidated view of key activities to a centralized location. There is now secure, firm-wide visibility into all phases of the loan application and approval process. The end result is a more secure, standard process for loan applications, reduced cost and time associated with credit applications, and better customer service.