Presented by: Eric Dickmann, Financial Services

Because so many of our customers are part of the Financial Services SIG, I wanted to make sure I attended this session to see what was going on here (especially since last year Amira Morcos had mentioned that there would be a business unit and general manager for this practice).

Eric is the new General Manager of the financial services IBU (discussed in this blog entry)

It was interesting to see the difference between approaches of PeopleSoft and Oracle to the Financial Services industry. Eric went through his solutions map for all 3 areas in financial services: Banking, Insurance, and Capital Markets. Where PeopleSoft focused primarily on the analytics and back-office solutions, Oracle will approach the market across all aspects of the industry including the front-office and point of sale systems (which is something PeopleSoft didn't address).

General Strategy
He described the goals of the financial institution within the following categories:

• Customer intimacy


• Competitive differentiation


• Cost effectiveness


• Compliance to regulation and risk mitigagion


• Service and speed are differentiation in industry.

He descripbed the execution strategy of his group as follows:

• Process driven


• Pre-built


• Ineroperable


• Flexible

Oracle's approach will be to assemble existing assets. Also to provide mulitiple deployment options for customers that include hosting, packaged products, or tools and custom applicagtions.

These solutions will cover all the way from front office to back office. Showed the product footprint for different areas - solution maps. These are available at http://www.oracle.com/industries/financial_services/index.html .

Product
From a product perspective, the solution will cover the following main areas

• pre-built integrations for a ccount origination


• Governance, risk, and compliance for financial services


• advisor desktop


• claims management


• profitability and asset/liability management analytics (new products)


• flexcube with oracle identity managmeent

Compliance
On the Compliance side, the solution will include GRC for banking, insurance, capital markets, covering

• sox


• mifid, regnms


• operational risk


• compliance risk


• basel 2 and 1a, solvency 2


• aml, kyc, fraud prevention

Role of Siebel
Siebel looks to be a very important part of the financial services strategy:

• Siebel will cover a good amount of the back-end systems, such as Siebel CRM as bck-end for account origination (this will integrate with i-flex's flexcube for identity management).


• Siebel CRM on demand for advisor desktop. first pre-built hosted crm solutions for wealth management. web services. shows user interface and analytics.


• Enterprise claims management solution - partof siebel 8. claims management, context management, financial hub, back office.

For dashboards, Eric showed a few dashboards related to SOX and gauges of status of controls. powered by the OBIEE framework. He did not discuss where data is coming from and said that this is new. This means that PeopleSoft's solutions in this space is not going to be part of this solutions map.

Profitability - this is where PeopleSoft was strong. Instead of using PeopleSoft EPM, Risk Weighted Capital, and Funds Transfer Pricing, Oracle will be using OFSA and OBIEE as the solution for this.

Questions:

Question	Answer
Can you talk more about what's going on with PeopleSfot financial servces side?	If you're a PeopleSoft customer, you will continue to be supported by applications unlimited. HCM will continue to be a focus area for PeopleSoft.
I'm another PeopleSoft Customer. Can you tell me more about what I can expect as a PeopleSoft customer about Fusion?	Everything you saw in this presentation is based on Fusion.

What I saw missing
I didn't see any mention of PeopleSoft EPM or the financial services analytic applications that were hosted on the EPM warehouse. I also didn't see any recognition of role of PeopleSoft GL in financial services organizations who are part of this Industry Group. By reading between the lines, it looks like the development team at Oracle isn't going to be focused on these areas, even though the the vast majority of attendees (>80%) categorized themselves as PeopleSoft customers.

Summary
It will be interesting to see how this strategy plays out. The Oracle solutions map is definitely much envcompassing than PeopleSoft's, especially in the banking and CRM areas. This could be a good opportunity for them. With respect to corporate performance management, compliance, and analytics, I think that Oracle will have a challenging time getting traction with much of the members of the industry group until they come up with a better story for organizations using PeopleSoft Financials and EPM. From an engineering perspective, I believe packaging analytics in OBIEE that are targeted specifically to EPM (funds transfer pricing, risk weighted capital, etc), as well as PoepleSoft Financials will allow them to extend existing solutions with new products and features versus leaving it up to the customer to figure out how to accomplish this themselves.

Labels: 2008, Collaborate