Banking - Finance - Insurance

Introduction

For the financial sector today, information technology service companies such as GFI are important partners. Improving productivity is essential, and the services delivered to millions of end customers are becoming more and more sophisticated. Financial information systems are different because they exist in a connection between large systems and new technologies. This relationship between different information technologies needs to provide an answer to the challenging ambitions of a bank: improve productivity, reduce operational costs, satisfied customers, and increase the net income.

The financial sector focuses its technological orientation on three main objectives: industrialising core business activities (treating the daily operations as fast as possible), improving customer relations (customer loyalty), and strengthen risk management.

With more than 1.300 consultants active in the financial industry, GFI is an important partner able to intervene anywhere and everywhere in the information system life cycle. At the starting phase of projects, GFI can make financial business consultants available. Afterwards, the banks can count on a thorough technological expertise on the integration of banking software. In addition, GFI has a Service Centre of more than 300 people. This enables GFI to respond to the expectations of the banks regarding core business resource optimisation and industrialisation of their application assets.

Insurance companies are confronted with regulatory evolutions at the same intensity, but also the need to transform their customer relationship management in order to adapt to changing market conditions, and to remain in contention towards new inputs and new practices.

History

For over twenty years, GFI is positioned on the detail banking market. Following the acquisition of the BDT group in 2007, GFI has enlarged its investment banking offering and its asset management offering through a specialised agency of 50 functional and/or technical experts. This entity is able to offer and entire portfolio of business consulting services, and integration and homologation services for financial and investment banking institutions and asset management companies.

In October 2001, GFI created a Service Centre based in Lille(FR) for BNP Paribas. This centre enables BNP Paribas to take advantage of a large competence and expertise source regarding their own information systems that allows them to absorb resource and effort fluctuations in all their projects. Very soon, the Lille Service Centre also became the back-office for specific BNP Paribas developments performed by GFI. In this way, GFI responds to the bank’s expectations regarding core-business resource optimisation, and industrialisation of their application assets.

In the beginning of 2008, GFI integrated the engineering branch of the software house Viveo, which places us in the top 5 of the technological companies in the banking sector. With about 500 employees, Viveo has 25 years of experience in the banking world and offers widely-used banking software in more than 30 countries. The seamlessly integrated V.Bank software suite covers the entire business of banks and financial institutions. The software is used daily in over 700 of the largest banks in order to manage the complete business processes. The goal of this partnership is to reinforce the system integration activities of GFI in the European financial sector.

In 2009, GFI entered into a partnership with Clear2Pay, international supplier of new generation payment technologies for financial institutions. The partnership is in essence centred on GFI housing/hosting the Clear2Pay eBanking solutions and the EBICS solution in SaaS mode. GFI will also distribute the Clear2Pay Integri test tools.

Conclusion

For information service companies, the financial market is an essential element of their development. The long-term ambition of GFI is big in terms of further developing this market. The Viveo partnership illustrates the strategy of GFI in this sector: even more added-value and business solutions. The important progress of the Lille Service Centre clearly demonstrates the ambitions of GFI in this domain: even more industrialisation so that banks can continue to focus on their core business.

Large system integrators such as GFI have to continue their transformation and generate added-value by undertaking some challenges that institutions in the financial sector have to face. It is through this approach that GFI wants to be a leader in the top 5 of information leaders in this vertical.