Best in Fintech Recognised at Digital Jersey TechAwards 2020

We are incredibly proud of the collaboration with JTC and we feel this is such a wonderful example of what we can produce within this unique ecosystem: Jersey’s world-class established financial services firms working with native Jersey technology businesses to deliver sector-leading and sustainable results.

The nomination recognised the successful delivery, on time and on budget, of a single banking payments platform, resulting in up to 75% reduction in payment-processing times and up to 90% reduction in error rates. The centralised banking and treasury hub is integrated with all core banks and the internal bookkeeping solution, all deployed securely within JTC’s network and designed with the scalability to deploy across JTC’s 20 offices and 1,100 personnel and support future growth aspirations. This project was never about simple automation or digitisation of existing processes; it has delivered a re-engineering of many treasury, payments and bookkeeping activities through one consistent interface, and it wouldn’t have happened without the combined expertise of finance professionals and experienced technology professionals working as one team under the sponsorship of JTC.

We believe that truly impactful change using technology in finance can only come from products that are trusted and valued by users; we are most proud of a comment from one of the JTC Directors, Mark Fleming:

“The day jobs of the members of my teams have transformed: we now focus on one platform for all of our payments and banking activities, which has created additional capacity to provide real value-add services to our clients.  My management team and I now have a simple, clear, digital authorisation process to follow with all the information and evidence in one specific area for us to review.  This means that we can now speak with so much more confidence to our clients on banking matters, have more up to date information and be more transparent about the payments process.”

Commenting on the win, Adam Jeffries, Group Chief Information Officer for JTC added:

“At JTC, we have a real focus on implementing smart digital solutions to enable our skilled workforce. For many years the strategy at JTC has been to work with what we see as best in class software vendors, and form strong partnerships with them. We have been working with BankClarity for over 3 years now, we have excellent relationships in place with them across many areas of our business and they are a part of our ongoing strategic planning.

“This award is testament to this trusted relationship. By joining together BankClarity’s excellent technical and analyst skills with JTC’s expert operational & business teams, in a very open and frictionless manner, we were able to scope and re-engineer complex, standalone, manual processes and provide one consistent digital interface which our employees say is simple and clear.”

Agile Automations specialise in developing unique, custom coded, Robotic Process Automations (RPA) as well as Robotic Desktop Automations (RDA); putting robotics and automation at the very heart of the organisation’s infrastructure, to release the true potential of your workforce.

Agile Automations offers the opportunity to access the skills and expertise of a proven, specialist, dedicated team, who are successfully creating and implementing bespoke Robotics; creating savings of tens of millions of pounds, enhancing customer service improving staff retention and improving governance and risk controls, not to mention the level of efficiencies which Robotics offer an organisation.

Agile Automations develops and writes its own software coding; we do not use any platforms, which allows us to offer a truly complete, flexible, robotics solution for our clients; offering a bespoke solution, to their unique individual requirements, ensuring you always receive the solution required, without any need to compromise in the end solution.

We are honoured to have been nominated in the Digital Jersey Tech Awards, for the ‘Best use of Technology in finance’, with the category sponsored by Jersey Finance. We were nominated for a recent Robotic Process Automations project, which we undertook.

In this project, we removed the need for human involvement, instead, automating their processes, saving time, from manual keying and having to readdress work, caused by incorrect, initial inputs. The automation generated a number of benefits; Improved customer satisfaction as payments processed near instantly, while reducing FTE.

In addition, the client saw a Reduction in reputational risk due to transactions being 100% accurate and absent of errors or duplication. The client also benefited through enhanced regulatory compliance, with all checks being completed, automatically and full compliance process completed each time.

There were also environment benefits, through a reduction of paper usage and storage costs, with the audit trail being automated and removal of manual paperwork being passed between teams for signing and completion.

We were nominated for our project to implement CMAP, a Practice Management System, to replace our aging legacy system. System implementations are one of the most prevalent types of technology project in financial services, so what made this one special and why did we get nominated?

Firstly, we got the basics right. Through the application of robust change management processes, it was delivered on time, on budget and with complete adherence to the agreed specification. Anyone who has tried to deliver an organisation-wide project with multiple, disparate stakeholders will appreciate that this in itself is no mean feat.

Secondly, it delivered, or in some cases over-delivered, the benefits we had set out in the business case. For example, it introduced significant efficiencies such as removing 6 days of admin support from the month-end process and reduced physical printing by 47%. We were able to use CMAP’s flexibility to create a number of bespoke features and reports to further enhance the business. OF particular note are the CDD/KYC extensions which not only give our Compliance team complete oversight of all AML activity, but has also reduced the time it takes to compile the annual NRA submission by 80%.

Thirdly, and this is probably the most crucial element, is we selected a partner not a vendor. Through our partnership with CMAP we have had the product extended to include improved integration with third-party products and made key additions to support recovery rate management. The highlight here is the Teams integration which was the core of CMAP’s summer 2020 release. This was conceived by BDO pre-pandemic and we worked together with CMAP to quickly bring this to market in order to support those teams working remotely.

“The way BDO have embraced CMAP really is best-in-class – not only did they quickly get up to speed with the core functionality, but they took that one stage further by configuring CMAP in such a way as to create innovative use cases and custom processes. What BDO have built on top of the core CMAP platform is very advanced, and we actually hold BDO up as the ‘leading light’ in that regard when speaking to other firms across the finance industry. We’ve found their whole approach to technology to be very forward thinking, and that’s lead to an incredibly collaborative relationship – for example working in partnership on our Microsoft Teams integration, a feature which has been loved by customers and prospects alike.”

Dave Graham, CEO, CMAP Software

eQ, RBSI’s digital banking platform for corporate and institutional customers

The onboarding process was not just a problem for us; it’s a headache for all banks. The RBSI on-boarding process for Institutional Banking customers was heavily constrained by paper, manual processes and inefficient systems. A major pain point, it would often take weeks, to get a bank account opened.

No other bank is able to provide a fully integrated digital onboarding process for Institutional Banking customers in our jurisdictions.

As part of our “easy bank” vision and strategy, the objectives of the project were to:

• Enable all customers to digitally complete on boarding applications via our existing customer portal.
• Provide dynamic rules to ensure applications were “right first time”.
• Provide workflow driven process to improve efficiency and speed.
• Automate integration with internal systems.
• Automate risk rating and business appetite assessments.
• A decision was made early to deliver a Minimum Viable Product quickly and, if necessary, fail fast rather than spend many months creating a perfect solution. This paid off – the project delivered a system that has solved a major issue for the bank.

Over an 18 month period, RBS International delivered a proof of concept standalone system and 3 major releases into production.

Jersey customer testimonial  “It has made the account opening process a lot speedier, we were able to open 40 bank accounts within a 6 week period which is brilliant. The clear benefits are the speed in which the system works, it never crashed, it ran very smoothly and I was able to navigate my way round the very straight forward sections fluidly.”

Find out more information on eQ