The bank, recently licensed by FINMA, has introduced innovative processes, fully digital, to offer products and services to its client base that integrate new technologies and traditional banking.
While the main focus is on designing effective digital onboarding and on developing solutions to support dealing in financial instruments both digital and traditional, attention is also devoted to internal processes, with the will to have effective Change management and Vendor management, associated with a proper project portfolio governance.
The goal of our mandate is to leverage on the several development and collaborative tools already available at the bank, building a coherent and complete set of processes, ensuring to the bank a robust framework to i) govern the multitude of projects that characterize the strategy execution and ii) manage and control IT vendors and outsourcers in the full respect of the regulations into force as well as of the bank risk management principles.
The proposed project governance introduces classical key controls to monitor the adherence of the IT project goals with the business needs and expectations / ambitions, enriched with additional controls combining agile methodologies and the more traditional waterfall techniques.
Indicators are designed to detect i) ongoing changes to requirements putting at risk the deliverables, ii) potential resource shortage, both financial and human, in order to prevent changes to the overall planning of each single project, but with specific views on Sprints and backlogs, typical of the Agile Software Development, where the implementation of requirements moves from a Sprint to another based on contingent decisions taken together with final users.
In terms of IT budget controls, starting from the Accounting principles in place, the monitoring procedures built rely on periodical reconciliations between the invoices flow, the Estimates at Completion from project managers and the annual budget.
Attention is provided to the maintenance of efficient controls over vendor expenditure, particularly important in presence of a multitude of vendors, justified by an application landscape particularly populated typical of fully digital platforms.
As a natural extension of the vendor management, our intervention is also covering the review of all the Service Level Agreements in place, with the objective to optimize the Service level measurement and monitoring, and to have a consistent Business Continuity Management across the several operation platforms, with integrated continuity plans and recovery objectives.