Content Matters

Creating and maintaining accurate reference data is not among the more glamorous aspects of the financial services industry; but it’s the backbone that drives numerous mission-critical applications.

From a CRM perspective, firms have long strived to have a 360-degree view of their customers.  Patriot Act, Bank Secrecy Act and FSA regulations have raised the bar in terms of “Know Your Customer” requirements.  New regulatory measures, such as MiFID and Basel II, designed to help regulators assess risk, require financial institutions to have a comprehensive picture of each of their client relationships.

In 2006, Alacra launched Alacra Concordance, as a means to help clients clean and maintain reference data from a wide range of internal and external sources.  In addition to the data cleansing process, Alacra Concordance appends various public and private identifiers and can also update credit ratings from ratings agencies like Fitch, S&P and Moody's. 

While we’ve heard numerous anecdotal examples from clients of cost savings and improved productivity,
it's been hard for us to quantify and communicate that effectively.  To better quantify those benefits, Alacra recently commissioned Forrester Consulting to perform an ROI analysis of the product, using Forrester’s TEI (Total Economic Impact) methodology.  Forrester conducted in-depth interviews with four Alacra customers and created a composite organization from the four. 

Forrester Consulting concluded that the composite company realized a 402 percent return on investment, and that the company paid for its use of Concordance within two months. The composite company realized $1,911,163 in cost savings by using the Alacra Concordance Solution.

The press release describing the TEI study is posted here.  To request a copy of the full TEI study, click here.