The financial sector today is characterized by globalization, consolidation and convergence. In this scenario, technology is a major driving force for achieving competitive advantage through cost reductions and creation of new business opportunities. Technology is creating more efficient enterprises, enabling new ways of reaching customers through new delivery channels and smoothly links once-disparate business practices

Mastek understands that the role of information technology today goes beyond being a supportive force in achieving business goals. It becomes a key driver to new business process thinking and a tool towards building a competitive advantage. Technology has become critical to success.

Mastek offers a comprehensive software services portfolio tailored for the Financial Services industry, complemented with its strong domain knowledge and technology and process capabilities to execute and deliver business solutions. Mastek offers financial software services and solutions in the domains of:

• Insurance
  
• Banking
  
• Brokerage

Since its inception in 1982, Mastek focused on the Financial Sector, beginning with offering services and solutions to leading Indian banks and finance companies. Mastek served leading companies such as State Bank of India (India’s largest bank), Bank of India, Deutsche Bank and the Export Credit Guarantee Corporation (ECGC) and ICICI. With its foray in International markets in US, Europe and Asia-Pac, Mastek continued to concentrate on the Financial Industry.

Since 1995, Mastek gave strategic focus to the Life insurance industry by developing a comprehensive; rich in functions back-office solution called ‘Elixir’, which has a number of sites in the Asia Pacific. Mastek built on its Insurance domain knowledge through the years by working with leaders in Insurance industry. Today Mastek has an Insurance Practice Line that has global Insurance clients to its credit.

With the legacy of a stock broking solution developed in 1985, Mastek built a ground-up Stock broking back office solution named PICADOR for the Malaysian and Indonesian markets, in 1995. The solution was recommended by Indonesian stock exchange as the best solution. Through the years, Mastek enriched its solution offering by adding on modules of Share margin financing, on-line real time risk management solution, front office solution and e-broking services. Mastek has adopted a 3-tier architecture framework for its end-to-end solution adding multiple business channels.

In Banking & Financial Services, Mastek offers application development and management services. For retail banking, Mastek has a workflow solution on Loan Origination to enable faster product launches, efficient loan processing and faster turnaround. Mastek has also engaged to build application on Internet banking for a total virtual bank.

Mastek continues its focus worldwide on Financial Industry and has a dedicated practice line to invest in building the domain knowledge, solutions and services.

The IT Challenges
Among the key IT challenges facing the Financial Services industry today are:

• Preserving investments in old systems while leveraging new technologies to drive down transactions costs, expand and improve customer service
  
• Integrating enterprise wide disparate systems to gain operational efficiencies
  
• Substantially reducing time for deployment of new systems
  
• Reducing IT costs and obtaining better ROIs for new investments in the long-term
  
• Straight Through Processing

The IT strategy
Only a carefully thought out long-term IT strategy backed by execution, implementation and support capability can meet these challenges successfully. A key component to this IT strategy is to partner with a vendor with the required execution, implementation and support capabilities. The capabilities required in itself are dynamic, driven by changing business processes and technology trends.

Mastek has a proven track record in the financial sector, technology competence and world-class software development facilities based in Mumbai and Pune in India and offers a wide range of financial software services and solutions and is poised to add significant value for its clients in the financial industry.

Getting systems ready for STP
This involves several issues such as:

• Redesigning batch-orientated processes to operate in real-time
  
• Automating processes which require manual intervention by using automated workflow management
  
• Integrating systems across all tiers to obtain a single, consistent view of transaction status at any one time
  
• Achieving flexibility through deploying business rules engines and middleware
  
• Complying with emerging market standards

Mastek with its extensive domain knowledge, strong application management expertise, impeccable quality credentials in software processes and a proven track record in building complex applications cost effectively is uniquely positioned to serve customers worldwide in the financial industry.