Quality Begets Speed-to-Market
for New Banking Products

New IMQS Process Drives Product Innovation,
Lower Risk for Banks

Without question, banks today are under tremendous pressure. Brought about by mega-mergers, increased competition, regulatory changes and technology shifts, the industry’s focus on cost-cutting often impedes innovation. Banks that have moved forward with new product offerings are so driven by speed-to-market that they are frequently forced to cobble together solutions, combining off-the-shelf products, in-house development and a parade of process workarounds just to meet customer demand.

As a result, many banks remain mired in a legacy of operational complexity that has increased their infrastructure maintenance burden and functionally impaired their ability to bring new products and services to market efficiently. Unable or unwilling to toss out their old systems, many of these banks are in the process of building blueprints to transition current environments to more responsive and profitable ones.

The Road to Success or Road Kill?
It’s a well-known fact that the success of any IT project is directly related to good planning and design. Without a proper understanding of business requirements up front, projects can quickly find themselves on the path to failure. While banks have managed complex systems for years, the favorable market conditions of the past enabled them to bear corrective costs more readily. In this new, more challenging business climate, banks have no choice but to address complexity head on, and get projects right the first time.

According to Maggie Scarborough, Research Manager for Financial Insights, “banks and financial institutions have a dual challenge – they must differentiate services by adding value to customers’ critical payments processes and they must become more efficient and adaptive during a time of unprecedented change in the payments environment. The notion of a comprehensive payments engine, one that provides a single point of control, visibility to payments information and workflow leveraged across many types of payments, can deliver on both challenges and help financial institutions establish market leadership.”

The Right Stuff
While there are no manuals that tell you everything-you-need-to-know to ensure a successful project, choosing the right product to meet the business requirements of the financial institution and its corporate clients is the first step on the road to success. The second, and most important step, is selecting an implementation partner with the experience and knowledge base to ensure speed-to-market, reduced risk, lowest ongoing cost of ownership, and a logical upgrade path for future expansion and updates without costly customization.

From a product and implementation services perspective, Bottomline has set out to address the challenges that banks face today with a unique approach to global payments that offers seamless integration with back-office legacy systems. The WebSeries® Enterprise Payments Platform’s powerful combination of sophisticated workflow capabilities for Straight-Through Processing (STP) and multi-bank, multi-currency data integration allows financial institutions to leverage a single, Web-based interface for the origination and processing of all types of inbound and outbound domestic and international payments.

Experience Matters
Together with product, Bottomline’s new Implementation Methodology for Quality and Success (IMQS) strategy capitalizes on nearly 20 years of in-market experience to offer banking customers an informed approach to project success that puts quality first. Bottomline’s IMQS process is comprised of a tightly defined series of phases and tasks that use iterative development, quality assurance and deployment methods proven to maximize customer return and minimize project risk.

Each phase of this new methodology is based on Bottomline’s track record of on-time, on-budget delivery of complex applications to a large customer base, including Tier 1 banks and hundreds of Fortune 1000 enterprises. A guiding focus on quality provides the safeguards required to eliminate errors in each phase of execution. Emphasizing prevention in this way speeds product time-to-market and reduces the failure costs that can impact a bank.

IMQS’ interconnected four-step implementation strategy starts with a discovery phase designed to establish a comprehensive project baseline, followed by technical and functional specification, implementation and testing, and deployment phases. A keen understanding of quality control and failure points along the way enables Bottomline’s expert project consultants to ensure that all milestones are achieved to plan. Ongoing reporting, change management and project reviews keep stakeholders in alignment and ensure clear decision-making channels as the project progresses toward completion and ultimately, success.

Learn more about Bottomline’s Enterprise Payments Platform and professional services approach, or contact a Bottomline Banking Specialist at 1.800.472.1321.