Overhauling banking ops with Amdocs
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What
Amdocs is a Missouri-based developer of customer-experience and operations solutions for communications, media, and other sectors. Founded in 1982, Amdocs is a publicly traded company. Though the company has had banking clients for over 15 years, Amdocs added banking and financial services as a strategic focus three years ago, dedicating assets and expertise to those sectors.
Why
According to Zur Yahalom, SVP & Head of Financial Services at Amdocs, the company’s move into banking and financial services was a logical extension of its existing areas of expertise. “We did a very in-depth analysis, looked at multiple markets and verticals, and came to the conclusion that a lot of the assets and capabilities that we've built over the years are actually very transferable to banking and financial services,” he said.
Amdocs has partially rebranded itself in the process; where it was previously a customer experience-focused company with the tagline “Make it Amazing,” it’s now focused on a comprehensive suite of products and consulting services to help better serve customers. And, as a company with a demonstrated track record helping clients overhaul their operations, Amdocs can both be a banking and financial-services challenger without having to start from scratch reputationally.
How
Core to Amdocs’s plan to establish itself in banking and financial services is an effort to gradually modernize banks' service offerings and operations. “We're not going to the biggest banks in the world and transforming their entire business overnight, but we're taking bits and pieces instead towards becoming that partner helping them to evolve the way they serve their customers,” Yahalom said.
In Yahalom’s opinion, customer-facing banking operations have to compete with the benchmark established by the likes of Amazon or Apple. Bringing that level of service requires three pillars, he said. The first is to have the right data consolidated to fully know a customer and derive insights from that data, such as family connections, birthdays, future purchases like a home or car, and so forth. The second pillar entails having the right channels in place to interact with customers. And finally, the third pillar is the ability to package a set of products and price it correctly for that customer.
Amdocs helps with all three pillars, though the third is the heaviest lift. It’s therefore built out a platform that helps create customizable products, pricing, and offers for customers across multiple lines of business and verticals. Called the Product Pricing Catalog, the product crucially “helps colleagues extract the product and pricing information from multiple sources, typically their legacy core system, and then makes a lot of that accessible to a business user,” Yahalom explained.
That interpretative layer particularly matters for established banks using relatively antiquated core systems. Larger banks are particularly hesitant to completely overhaul their core, and instead opt to hollow their core—moving critical functions into a modern layer—over time in order to make a core overhaul a smaller lift. “When you get to the point where you took a lot of the functionality out of the core, it becomes more natural that the next step in the evolution would be potentially to replace that core and modernize that core,” Yahalom said.
Amdocs anticipates continuing to enhance its capabilities for banks and FIs looking to hollow their core and modernize how they operate within their existing infrastructure. To Yahalom, that means continuing to import the company’s “fresh point of view” into banking and financial services, delivering value to clients and consumers alike.
