hdpmcS – Business | Technology | Advisory

industry domains

industry domains

At hdpmcS, we strongly believe in specialisation. From an industry perspective this means that our advisory focuses on financial services. This is the industry we know, and this is the industry where we believe we can add significant value to our clients in an advisory role.

Retail, Corporate & Investment Banking

hdpmcS is well versed in the various fields of banking. In the retail banking sector, hdpmcS has significant experience in large scale core banking implementations with deployment of standard packages like SAP or Oracle. In prior roles, our advisors have successfully delivered these challenging projects, in South Africa as well as roll-outs to other African countries.

As for the corporate banking side, we have worked with leading institutions on their new corporate online banking channels, and important aspect of the b2b relationship a corporate bank has with its large customers.

On the investment banking side, the landscapes are often categorized by a patchwork of different technology stacks serving different asset classes. We have contacts and understand the key strength and weaknesses of the various packages (Calypso, Murex, Sophis, Thomson Reuters, Wallstreet Systems, etc) in the market.

Life, Short Term and Direct Insurance

A particular issue that all life insurers face is the proliferation of their legacy platforms, especially when sitting on a ‘closed book’. Efforts for platform consolidations have often been undertaken, but have proven not always to bring the desired outcome. In this case, there is no panacea. The underlying situation and complexity of old insurance products needs to be carefully analysed in order to come up with suitable recommendations. Myopic focus on a started platform consolidation (which can take years) may easily stall vitally needed market facing product innovation in an organization.

In short term insurers, a significant portion of the business success is usually determined by claims. Agile and up-to-date fraud analytics as well as efficient and standardized processing of claims are a must for a short term insurer.

Direct insurance is another field where hdpmcS has previously engaged in the process design and implementation. Ideally, a new direct insurer should be set up separately from its mother company in terms of processes and IT. Otherwise, the ‘innovators dilemna’ effect could easily stall the efforts to create a swift and nimble organization that can successfully enter the market.

Trading, Clearing & Settlement

The market infrastructure ecosystem of trading, clearing and settlement has its very own challenges. Whereas the trading side, especially on-exchange trading, poses extreme requirements on high transaction volumes and low latency to support the underlying market models, processing complexity increases exponentially further down the processing chain for the clearing (e.g., multilateral netting) and later on the settlement (e.g., corporate actions processing), with the latter ones often considered to be the back-office of the more glamorous and visible trading. hdpmcS and selected of its business affiliates have significant experience in this high specialised industry segment.

Risk & Regulatory

The financial services sector is one of the most heavily regulated industries. However, many organizations merely consider regulatory compliance and the related risk management as a tick-box exercise.

Yes, compliance to regulation is vital and needs to be the short term goal for any organisation. hdpmcS has experience in the interaction with regulators, banks and exchanges to achieve this.

However, our advisory doesn’t stop there. An important aspect is to see beyond the compliance exercise and identify how an organisation can turn the constant changes and amendments in regulatory frameworks into a competitive advantage.