A team of skilled and experienced personnel, focused on the business driven criteria of our clients;
• Our capability to provide end to end assistance, from business planning, process improvement and redesign, unbiased vendor selection and project management for implementation;
• Our knowledge and understanding of the Northeastern community banking market along with the intricacies of commercial, consumer, mortgage, retail and electronic banking businesses;
• Assisting our clients’ with their need to integrate core and ancillary systems;
• Our understanding of the bank regulatory desires, and now requirements, for an effective vendor selection process (complying with FFIEC guidelines on system acquisition);
• An efficient vendor evaluation process that facilitates all your functional teams through the service provider selection process; and
• Our direct knowledge of and working relationship with the major vendors.
Our approach is fact-based and leaves relationships and pleasantries aside while the vendor strength, viability, capabilities and costs are thoroughly and efficiently obtained, verified, and made “apples-to-apples”. We have a proprietary database of substantially all the core banking system vendors – Fiserv ITI, Fiserv Vision, Fiserv CBS, Metavante, OSI, Jack Henry Silver Lake and 20/20, Harland Phoenix, COCC Insight, Fidelity Horizon and others that we maintain and update throughout the year through vendor meetings and interviews, vendor selection projects and our strategy and operational consulting assignments. We use this database to help your personnel and project team to efficiently and quickly evaluate these options to limit the number of vendor contacts and demonstrations. We initiate RFI of all these vendors periodically throughout the year to keep our database current with such information as: customers, development initiatives, business partners/system interfaces, etc. The NEBSG Approach We use a multi-step and highly collaborative approach to vendor selection. Each step requires active participation by your personnel and officers, but we take all the responsibility in dealing with the vendors and accumulating the data and information needed for the selection.
These tasks enable NEBSG and your project team to accumulate and analyze data about the current and future technology environment, business and operational requirements and related costs. Additionally, the analysis will provide identification and delineation of specific features that should be included in any contract negotiated with a vendor. Our approach includes:
Codify Business Functional and Technical Requirements:
- The results of this step provide a foundation for the institution’s technology planning objectives and define the requrements for the vendors to fully respond to.
Develop Baseline and Gap Analysis:
- The NEBSG team will perform a gap analysis between the requirements defined by your personnel and the existing core and peripheral application solution(s) and allow your personnel to quickly and efficiently focus on these differences to assess their impact.
Review Vendor Solutions:
- Considering your requirements, we will mutually compare notes with the financial institution about the major vendors providing core banking application solutions and create the Request for Proposal (RFP) for the selected vendors.
Coordinate RFP responses and Perform Data Analysis:
- NEBSG will coordinate each of the vendors’ responses to the RFP and perform data analysis based upon each of the vendor’s responses to the items contained in the RFP key area of analysis.
Vendor Review and Discovery Sessions:
- An interactive process begins to review the vendor’s responses, review the cost analysis, and rank the vendors in terms of company strength, specific offers and cost. Perform due diligence to determine user satisfaction with the applications functional capability, the vendors responsiveness to user needs,and the vendors support for technological change, conversion and training support, and quality of releases.
Contract Review and Negotiation:
- NEBSG can assist the institution in reviewing and commenting on the proposed costs and terms and conditions. Among others, we review the contract term, conversion performance penalty, volume baseline and growth, exit penalty, service levels, technological investment, conversion commitments, training, disaster recovery, regulatory compliance, and documentation provided. For and further detail on NEBSG’s vendor selection, IT planning and conversion assistance services, please call Thomas Grottke or Jennifer Healy at 860-436-6149.