How can an organization launch new offerings without interrupting or impacting on existing business?
This is the challenge that brought IBM and Quid together to create a management solution for banks and financial services companies operating in the consumer credit sector. Their joint solution convinced Prexta, part of the Mediolanum Group, to innovate a new set of products. Prexta was previously a highly specialized company called EuroCQS, operating in the Italian “salary transfer” market. (In Italy, individuals can take out loans for which the maximum monthly repayment is capped at 20 percent of their salary. Repayments for these “salary transfer” loans are deducted directly from the individual’s paychecks).
To expand its offer to include personal loans, Prexta searched the market for a solution that would facilitate the establishment of the new business. There were two key criteria: rapid deployment and minimal impact on existing business, with no interruption to current operations and zero slowdowns or bottlenecks in the IT infrastructure.
The collaboration between IBM and Quid resulted in a SaaS (software-as-a-service) offering whereby the Qinetic application – an innovative platform for consumer credit process management – runs in an IBM Cloud® environment that benefits from the superior levels of availability, security and compliance offered by IBM Cloud for Financial Services®.
For the company, renamed Prexta to emphasize its new business direction, the choice of the Qinetic SaaS offering was a natural one. The company was able to adopt the new solution within just six months, and was immediately operational thanks to the service delivery on IBM Cloud.
Existing on-premises components for managing the original EuroCQS products have been augmented by the addition of the new Personal Loan component, which is linked to both the administrative systems and the digital services already present in the company. Since the go-live, Qinetic has made it possible to add digital services that were not previously available and to easily integrate further initiatives from Prexta.
Qinetic supports all technical forms of consumer credit (finalized loans, APE, CQS, TFS, Peer2Peer Lending, and so on), which could be immediately activated if Prexta decides to sell these products through the new platform.
In addition to the flexibility offered by the Qinetic platform to support ongoing changes in the business, Quid offers Prexta an end-to-end service that includes the management of application infrastructure, operational processes, monitoring and security of data residing in the cloud.
That’s not all: Quid also manages application development through DevOps, provides application management services, and is the focal point for all incident handling, including support issues involving other vendors and services.
Thanks to the full adoption of DevOps protocols and the presence of a dedicated Service Manager focused on solving both existing and emerging challenges, the customer has more control over fixes and releases than with an on-premises solution.
In hosting Qinetic, IBM Cloud uses platform management tools within the IBM Cloud for Financial Services framework, bringing operational security and quality-of-service monitoring that are fully aligned with industry regulations and best practices. This is a decisive element in convincing and supporting customers in their journey of adopting cloud solutions to replace traditional banking platforms.
IBM Cloud for Financial Services is designed to help financial institutions take advantage of the innovation tools offered by the cloud in a very agile way, while adhering to high security standards and in compliance with the regulations imposed on credit institutions.
These features make IBM Cloud an ideal platform for hosting services offered to banking customers by ISVs and third parties, such as Quid Informatica. A broad ecosystem of IBM Cloud for Financial Services partners provides customers with qualified and agile support that enables them to innovate without sacrificing the high levels of security and transparent risk management required by the industry.
The advantages of Qinetic's evolution towards SaaS are:
- The simplicity of integration and the ability to quickly create new offerings
- The ability to migrate on-premises components to IBM Cloud for Financial Services after experiencing the comparative benefits of this new approach, in terms of effectiveness and cost-efficiency
- A service managed directly by Quid with quality and continuity
- The ability to test the Qinetic solution on IBM Cloud in sandbox mode, through the availability of a fully operational POC environment.
Qinetic is an innovative B2B management solution launched by Quid in 2016 for the management of credit products targeted at private individuals and, from this year onwards, also at small businesses.
In terms of technological characteristics, the platform is native to Kubernetes (or any other type of container) and can be installed both on-premises and in the cloud. This means that it can meet all the needs of a consumer credit company as well as being deployable within more complex environments such as a multi-product bank. The solution offers many integration points and methods, and is almost completely configurable to any customer processes and products without the need for application development.
Founded in 1987 to provide ICT services to the industrial world, since 2002 Quid has developed a growing presence in the financial services sector. In this market, which today is the main focus of the company, Quid has become a reference technology partner through the creation of complex solutions for the lifecycle management of financial products.
The company’s long experience in the sector, combined with its deep knowledge of business processes, led in 2016 to the development of the proprietary Qinetic platform, successfully adopted by some of the leading Italian banks for the end-to-end management of consumer credit products.
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Statistics on value of managed loans and customer numbers sourced from https://quid.eu/ibm-fs-cloud/