Financial Services Firms Please Customers with Clarity

As part of our panel discussion with financial services companies, we wanted to know how their industry embraces innovative, technology-based solutions, and what the challenges of such approaches are within such a traditional and highly regulated industry.

What are the challenges you need to overcome to be successful?

We need to be able to deliver value-driven solutions for our customers and employees. Time to market is critical, so we have to deliver in relatively short increments and reassess investments regularly to ensure we are always delivering the right solutions. At the same time, we have to align with the company’s more traditional process and approval frameworks, providing our leadership — and regulators —with transparency and insight into everything we’re doing.

How do you go about addressing those problems?

The only feasible option for us is to embrace a hybrid way of working. We combine the traditional approvals and initiation required for financial services industry processes with an agile approach to delivery. At the same time, we need to be able to provide visibility into our current work and any demand that is generating new work for upcoming cycles. What we need is a platform that can help us to do that while still allowing us to work in the way we want, rather than in the way the tool requires.

What do you do, and how does it help?

We have used Clarity from Broadcom Software since 2007. It allows us to do exactly what we need. We can follow our parent company’s requirements for approving and initiating new initiatives while still delivering those projects using an incremental approach. Clarity allows us to break our work into three- or six-month increments, with the ability to adjust and adapt at each of those increments. That means we’re always investing where we need to.

With Clarity we can also integrate ideation and demand management, helping us understand the work that will be coming our way in the upcoming business cycles. That allows us to make better investment decisions and plan our resource needs more effectively.

We also love the fact that even after 15 years, we can find new ways to work with Clarity to improve how we manage our work. Most recently, we have been looking at leveraging roadmaps and the new “milestones and events” functionality. We also love the ability to talk directly with Broadcom’s Clarity product team to explain our needs and press for new functionality.

How is this driving your success?

Broadcom’s Clarity solution gives us a single source of truth. All stakeholders have transparency into all work, which supports investment decisions, regulatory compliance, and everything else. Having a single solution for all our projects makes management much easier, and the ability to work in the way we want improves effectiveness and efficiency.

Most important of all, with a tool that works with us, we can deliver the right value at the right time, optimizing performance and delighting our customers.