Bank of Ireland Global Markets, with offices in Dublin, London, Bristol and Stamford Connecticut, provides Treasury and Risk Management services to the entire Bank of Ireland Group. Its worldwide Trade Operations and Risk Management functions are located within its Dublin offices.
In 2001 Bank of Ireland Global Markets embarked on a significant Change Program to transform its operational environment. A component of that was the introduction of an enterprise middleware infrastructure to allow straight-through processing. A key concern that emerged following its introduction was how the business could effectively manage the complete trade-lifecycle flows across multiple processes in a geographically dispersed, real-time, distributed application environment.
Bank of Ireland Global Markets goal was not to engage in a large BPM project but to seek to implement, in conjunction with the existing transformation projects, a solution which would quickly address the above concerns but also allow for the ongoing delivery of business efficiencies and enhanced operational risk management.
In 2003, initial discussions with PaceMetrics centred on a number of key issues, in particular the transparency of business flows across multiple business functions, the identification of business process gaps and the improvement of operational efficiencies in the Back Office, the management of Operational Risk and positioning the Bank to meet the regulatory and compliance requirements of Basel II.
It was agreed to implement a Pilot Project to demonstrate how the PaceMetrics solutions could:
• be implemented through non-intrusive integration with existing/new in-house/third-party applications
• deliver functionality without degradation of performance
• give management a real-time Dashboard of the overall transaction flow across multiple business functions
• identify gaps in the existing business processes and procedures
• provide real-time trade capacity/volume planning
• alert business functions to missing or delayed transactions
• improve staff productivity by flagging transactional errors in real-time
• improve the efficiency of exception resolution
• provide better Customer Service
• gather and analyse the data necessary to meet Basel II and other regulatory requirements
The pilot ran for 4 week period and quickly demonstrated the benefits of the PaceMaker system.
Full rollout began in January 2004, with final sign-off in March 2004. Subsequent phases would continue to deliver improved operational efficiencies and control.