What can be done to maximize your operations strategy. In the mid-1700s, Alexander Webster and Robert Wallace, two ministers of the Church of Scotland caused a major change that would alter the life insurance landscape forever. The plan they devised would invest the revenue from policy premiums and use the income generated from those investments to payout death benefit claims to the families of the insured. Much of the success of the newly-created fund can be credited to Wallace and Webster’s precise use of actuarial science such as understanding mortality rates of Scottish clergymen, along with life expectancies of the ministers’ wife and ...
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It was just a few years ago when a leading global consulting firm noted in their financial services outlook, that the “industry would switch gears from defensive compliance remediation to a proactive search for revenue growth and further cost reduction.” As topline growth stayed modest over the years, banks focused mostly on operational efficiencies to drive financial performance improvements. As an example, they looked for scale efficiencies through rationalizing their branch networks with only mixed results. Banks are very complex organizations, but as IT and Finance collaborate more to redefine their role and value, optimizing IT cost as ...
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Back in March 1991, Stewart Alsop, a venture-capitalist and editor of InfoWorld said, “I predict that the last mainframe will be unplugged on March 15th, 1996”. Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20, so we know now, this could not be further from the truth. The mainframe is not only ‘not’ a dinosaur, it may be the single most important technology in the financial services industry, running almost every large Bank and Insurance Company’s back end system in the world. Still today, seemingly only the mainframe can handle the performance requirements & reliability demands of these challenging operating environments and support the sheer volume of ...
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