By Shakir Ladak, CTO, Alpha Insight

As banks around the world face the increasingly burdensome requirements of regulators and the threat of more legislation and taxes, financial technology companies are falling over themselves to proffer every kind of remedy.

However, Alpha Insight, a fintech company with a three-year track record of exceptional delivery, is set to disrupt the market with its real-time process monitoring and measurement solutions.

In such testing times, banks certainly need to revolutionise how they monitor their business processes in order to avoid the kind of deeply damaging lapses that afflicted RBS and HSBC in the UK this year. Both were embarrassed by the failure to complete hundreds of thousands of payments on behalf of customers.

Furthermore, banks must be capable, not only of complying with the demands of new regulations such as BCBS239, but of demonstrating that they are doing so and showing how they go about it.

This is all the more difficult when banks have such vast and expensive IT estates that evolved over time and were often augmented as a result of acquisition. Their complexity is only compounded by the inevitable cost-saving push towards outsourcing that has occurred in many institutions.

In fact the conventional business flow monitoring employed in banks will no longer provide the level of insight that is required for either day-to-day efficiency, confidence, or compliance.

What Alpha Insight offers is the ability to build on the power of commonly deployed monitoring technology in the banking sector, such as Geneos, IBM Netcool, Splunk, AppDynamics and Abilisoft. Using its combined 300 years of specialist experience in working with banks, Alpha Insight develops the right business logic for each institution, defining what is critical, so that it can be measured in context and all threats flagged up before they do any damage – whether that is a potential breach of regulations or a failure in payments or reconciliations.

Using its unique business logic, the company determines what is critical within a bank’s processes from among millions of metrics. These key KPIs then become a set of service level targets (SLTs) that form the basis of its monitoring, cutting out the unnecessary noise from what is irrelevant.

Each process within a bank is mapped in relation to the underlying technology, before smart metrics are defined and linked to business performance. Thresholds and alerting parameters are then set and the monitoring points to support the metrics are delineated. Dashboards are designed and tested and teams trained in their use before performance reports start being delivered and the predictive capability of thresholds developed. In a short time a performance improvement plan is created and adhered to.

Alpha Insight has been making sense of complicated networks and processes, long before the term “spaghetti of IT systems” entered common use. Where a bank for instance, has complex trade flows, Alpha Insight can map the end-to-end trade flow through multiple applications, define key service level targets and implement real-time monitoring and alerting in relation to them.

The company’s founders and executives have defined a unique set of solutions, a fixed methodology and a toolset that can be perfectly tailored to each bank’s requirements, providing substantial increases in efficiency, transparency and confidence in both retail and investment sectors.

By providing a set of alerts that really matter and are fully understood, Alpha Insight gives institutions the immediate ability to solve problems, such as bottlenecks in payments or settlements, before they have any impact.

Furthermore, by enhancing the power of currently-installed monitoring technology many times over, Alpha Insight saves clients important costs in licensing and implementation. Its unique flow-monitoring becomes woven into the fabric of everyday operations at a bank, placing the entire organisation on a firm footing and protecting its reputation with its counterparties and regulators.

Operations and IT staff use the tools on a day-to-day basis to ensure the smooth conduct of all processes, sharing a common view and speaking the same language.

Performance criteria are established across all critical activities such as payments and securities, month-end reporting, Swaps reporting, BCBS239 compliance, trade and client connectivity and back office operations.

The ability to apply complex rules logic as part of flow monitoring ensures that deadlines, such as those for payments or regulatory cut-offs are met without fail, while for example, client satisfaction is increased through being the first to notify them of problems they are unaware of.

The benefits of implementing Alpha Insight’s flow monitoring solutions run right across any institution, injecting measurable efficiency gains and a renewed confidence in operations and compliance. When so much is at stake, no bank wants to be left bewitched and bewildered by a monitoring system no longer gives them any real idea of what is going on.

To find out more about Alpha Insight visit: www.alpha-insight.co.uk