Conference season always brings some decisions and conflicts, and this year’s first one (for me) came down to a decision between DST‘s ADVANCE in Phoenix, and IBM InterConnect in Las Vegas. DST had booked me to speak at this year’s conference right after last year, and when IBM combined Impact into InterConnect, the date moved from their usual March or April event to February, directly in conflict with DST. Also: Phoenix over Vegas? No competition.
DST has combined some of their smaller financial services events into ADVANCE this year, giving this a stronger than ever focus on financial services especially in the area of asset/fund management. This is a big chunk of their customer base, along with insurance, although many of the solutions that they offer — including their BPMS — cn apply to other verticals. I’ll be presenting later today about the challenges of onboarding, and how BPM, case management, smart process applications and other technologies can be applied to solve some of the business problems associated with these unpredictable, complex and risk-laden processes.
There were hands-on labs for customers yesterday, but the main conference started this morning with an opening session hosted by John Vaughn and featuring three of the senior management team, focused on the four key things that DST has been focusing on in the past year in order to help their customers with business growth and retention: transforming the customer experience, optimizing distribution, staying ahead of compliance risks, and providing smarter business process solutions. We heard a quick overview about their advances in customer experience; advanced analytics applied to distribution solutions leveraged by their acquisition of kasina; GRC solutions that extend into the distribution chain; and business process solutions including their onboarding, claims processing and AML/KYC frameworks, plus their upcoming AltServe offering for managing alternative investments.
Since DST has an outsourcing operation that processes a huge portion of the mutual fund and similar transactions in the US, and they are their own first and best customer, they know what they’re doing in creating technology solutions for managing the tough problems in financial services. As Vaughn pointed out during the keynote, a lot of the “easy” transactions are now being done outside your back office, either further up in the distribution channel or through customer self-service, meaning that the work being done internally includes more of the difficult, unpredictable business problems; their frameworks and solution accelerators are focused on many of those.
Lots of great sessions on the agenda today; I’m going to head to the BPM product strategy breakout to see what’s coming up