Case Studies B2B Customer & Commerce Portal—Digital Transformation for Global Financial Services Firm

B2B Customer & Commerce Portal—Digital Transformation for Global Financial Services Firm

Overview
Our client, a global financial firm, engaged Concurrency to help manage a major change to its business model—moving a core product from print to digital. The printed product had been, for decades, an essential purchase for certain financial professionals. Our client recognized that by digitally transforming its business model, the product could reach even more customers—and be more useful, through wizard-type features only possible in an interactive setting and through regular updates to the data.

The business case for digital transformation was strong, including through higher revenues, but there were significant pitfalls to avoid. Our client needed to build a secure, customer-friendly portal to deliver the financial reference information, market the new product, support it, and help longtime customers understand the value-add represented by the new approach.

The portal needed to support subscriptions purchased for anywhere from a single user to more than 1,000 users covered under an enterprise-level subscription. It also needed to accommodate our client’s own employees. And it needed to accommodate marketing and distribution both directly and through a network of third-party partners who had previously distributed our client’s printed product.

Our client sought Concurrency’s assistance on this business-critical project undertaken on a tight timeframe. Once a decision was made to move forward, there was no going back. The portal had to be functioning and ready for use on an established date that corresponded to the time of year when our client previously published the printed materials. We were deeply involved in technical design and implementation of this major undertaking as well as the organizational change management (OCM) needed to make it successful.

Solution
Concurrency worked closely with the client team to transform the business from print-publishing to a comprehensive digital solution that allows users to access tools, content, and data through a cloud web app. We designed and built the entire system in Azure to enable customer self-service identity management and reduce our client’s support costs. This intensive use of Azure was our client’s first major product run entirely in the cloud, which required OCM as our client’s IT team became familiar with how to manage and support the solution.

As we developed the web application, one of most important focus areas was establishing an optimal data flow. Whereas previously quarterly data updates had flowed through to print products, now the data needed to flow through to the web app.

Another key focus was security. We designed and implemented a user identity system that accommodated both internal (employees) and external users. We structured the solution in a replicable way in readiness for further digital transformation across other products and services offered by our client. 

Together with our client’s internal team, we had to work extremely quickly. The aggressive timeline was made possible by the fully cloud-based approach. We rolled out previews releases for testing and quickly adjusted them based on user feedback.

As development progressed, we also helped to guide OCM within our client’s organization—a critical need with such a big transformation. At the time of go-live, we served as second and third-tier support layers to ensure all customer needs were handled. 

This tight partnership led to the release of several new, innovative modules inside the core application.  As our client captured statistics about how users were using the data, new features were added to support its growing needs. More than just a valuation application, it became an Excel Add-In to further enhance the consumer experience.

One of the hallmarks of this project was how it affected our client’s employees, partners and customers. That’s typical in digital transformation projects that truly reimagine a business model. We were honored to participate in that process, helping our client achieve business benefits while ensuring that all stakeholders are well served.