Our expertise
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
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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
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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
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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