Finastra Improves Services Business Visibility and Profitability With Kantata

Finastra is a global business with around 8,000 employees. One of the challenges that can emerge in an enterprise business that has grown through numerous acquisitions, as Finastra has, is ensuring that groups are working in a standard and optimized way as they come together to deliver on a common objective. In essence, that employees, no matter where they are or where they came from, are operating as “One Finastra”. 

The business needed a solution that could help bring services teams together around a common set of practices, from project planning to project execution, with teams across the organization operating with the clarity and confidence needed to make context-rich decisions that protect project margins. Operating as “One Finastra” would require increased visibility into forecasts and a higher degree of financial control, with better insights into which practices were causing margin leakage on projects.

Kantata has enabled Finastra to standardize and streamline the processes that lead to successful project delivery. It has also equipped decision-makers with critical information about where specifically project leakage is occurring and which inefficiencies are causing it. This has enabled the services division to identify and triage problem areas quickly, which has both sped up the transformation journey for the services division, and has led to immediate financial benefits, reducing cost leakage by 36% in the first year.

With Kantata, Finastra has a programmatic framework for enforcing proper project planning, with clear steps users should take as the opportunity and project take shape. This additional rigor around project planning has had positive impacts downstream, both setting up projects for success and creating a holistic picture of what services can expect to happen and what resources the business needs in order to be ready. Decision-makers have more accurate data which is helping them make more confident, data-informed decisions that adequately address upcoming needs.

According to Andrea Stephens, Director, IT Enterprise at Finastra, “Kantata enforces people to plan projects properly, so we can see what we’re dealing with more accurately, and the guesswork around how the pipeline is managed is removed. That enables people to see potential problems sooner and get the right people involved. We can see what we will need from a staffing perspective. We can see pictures of the business that we couldn’t see before, and that enables us to anticipate, to track patterns, and to find solutions.”