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Trade Finance — Target Operating Model design

Use Case

How to design Trade Finance TOM

How to design Trade Finance Target Operating Model in a competitive market with growth opportunities, limited by regulatory constraints

  • Approach

    Business strategy:

    • Define mid & long term Business development plan for Trade Finance activity

    Organization, IT & operations assessment:

    • Identify & prioritize challenges and opportunities based on as-is analysis

    Target definition:

    • Define Target Operating Model addressing business ambitions and IT and operations stakes

    Projects portfolio definition:

    • Define business, IT and Operations projects portfolio to reach target

    Roadmap, business cases & budget definition:

    • Detail project business case and roadmap and build transformation budget

    Program governance definition:

    • Prepare Program implementation phase and build case for validation by the executive instance
  • Results

    Business strategy:

    3 years Plan with differentiated approach:

    • Per products:documentary products remains the core business activity, Growth opportunity in Europe for guarantees, supply chain financing identified as the largest growth perspective
    • Per Regions:heterogeneous development perspectives in Asia, Europe, Middle East or Americas

    Organization, IT & operations assessment:

    • Heterogeneous landscape, with different level of maturity per product category in term of IT and operational set up, depending on past investments efforts
    • Aging systems,heavy to maintain and to adapt, with increasing operational risks

    Target definition:

    TOM definition per product category, from an organization, process and IT point of view:

    • Optimize and further industrializeDocumentary Products Global set up
    • Design regional TOMsand secure operational set up for Guarantees
    • IndustrializeSupply Chain set up

    Projects portfolio definition:

    Prioritized projects covering all Product categories, with business, organization, IT and processes transformation initiatives, including:

    • Renew of the FO to BO IT platformfor traditional trade to better address business needs and operations constraints
    • Industrializationof the existing operational set up
    • Deployment of a regional set upfor new products

    Roadmap, business cases & budget definition:

    • Elaboration of Business casesfor each projects (estimated workload, investment and expected ROI)
    • Planning for each projects, taking into account interdependencies
    • Definition of 4 year implementation roadmap and budget

    Program governance definition:

    • Governance framework & principles validated by stakeholders
    • Budget and Roadmapvalidated by executive instance
  • Lessons Learned

    Business strategy:

    • Clear understanding of the business expectationsper product and regions required
    • Stability in the vision needed, to comply with IT & Operations time to market and longer investment cycle
    • A strong coordination between Business and Operationsis necessary to drive the investments according to Business priorities and manage the expectations related to Operations constraints

    Organization, IT & operations assessment:

    • Current state description & assessment results must be sharedwith business and operations stakeholders to reach consensus
    • Shared assessment of the current state proved a critical reference pointfor the next steps of the program
    • Unsurprisingly, business with low level of past investments are the one requiring more catch-up

    Target definition:

    • It is a good practice to set Guiding principlesto establish the foundation of the target (eg. Promote common solutions for the Filiere, prefer digital approach)
    • The scoping of the Target is critical:it is essential to resist including everything in the transformation program (eg. Local, tactical solutions, with no common or lasting impact)

    Projects portfolio definition:

    • Strong and clear governance of the Filièreis required to prioritize the projects
    • Involvement of expert and Senior Management is key to first assess the macro investment for each projects
    • Guiding Principles should remain the first filterto prioritize projects

    Roadmap, business cases & budget definition:

    • Build as much as possible a roadmap with intermediary steps (“plateau”)that are stable and sustainable
    • Do not under-estimate the bottleneck effecton experts teams who could be solicited on several streams in parallel
    • Anticipate in the build-up of the Business cases the investment and revenue allocation model

    Program governance definition:

    • Refine and clarify as much as possible the story-tellingexplaining the reasons and the expected benefits of the transformation program
    • Clarify and simplify as much as possible the Program governancewith a limited number of attendees, clear objectives for each instance, the right level of representatives , and an efficient escalation process
    • Prepare staffingfor implementation