The air was thick with vision, brilliance, and esteem at this year’s SAPPHIRE NOW conference. A think tank full of curious minds and entrepreneurial opportunists, the multitude of sessions gave participants an opportunity to hear about and learn from the challenges and successes their business peers have experienced. The open-minded energy and culture of knowledge were vibrantly visible.
In particular, the buzz of innovation and transformation were apparent in the banking industry sessions. Here are some session highlights:
Sean Lewis, director at New York Life
Insurance Company, wanted to create a strong vision to lead his company
forward. New York Life Insurance Company is the largest mutual life-insurance company in the United States, with the best ratings across the board. In order to maintain those standards, that vision had to include plans to mitigate risk. As Lewis explained, “Everything is checked; everythingis balanced.” Facing consistent regulatory challenges and increasing volumes of data, the company relied on SAP to build a foundation of people, processes, and technology to tighten efficiencies and effectiveness and keep the lofty goal of changing the “face of finance.” See how SAP Insurance Analyzer was able to provide the company:
- A single version of the truth
- An expedited and automated financial
closing process - A single source for model point
generation, including assumptions - An optimized data model and mature infrastructure and
cutting-edge in-memory technology
Ralph Treitz and Luisa Silva, from the
rapidly growing start-up Bankhawk Analytics, needed a partner as strategic and
dexterous as they. In their session, “Optimize Cash Flow and Manage Banking Relationships,” Treitz and Silva described how they wanted to establish a way for banking
professionals to get the insights they needed from their data in order to be more competitive and profitable. As they explained, more than $5 trillion in working capital is tied up in inefficient processes – trapping companies’ money and hindering action and growth – so they founded a business that could find and analyze those hidden costs for companies. Implementing SAP HANA, they were able to eliminate hundreds of hours of work by creating a system that populated results within 3 to 5 seconds. This game-changing tool gives their clients an interactive application they can play with that incorporates gamification and scenario testing at incredible speed. The entrepreneurs stated that working with continually evolving solutions from SAP essentially “future proofs” their business model.
Marianne Clements, vice president of finance at AIG;
Brett Winchell, HR director, workforce measurement and technology at Allstate
Insurance; and David Henstock, vice president of the Global Commercial
Solutions group at Visa, shared their unique stories about integrating cloud solutions from SAP to cut costs and increase efficiency. They were all in agreement that innovation doesn’t have to mean more complexity, but rather more simplicity, the speakers described how SAP has made them more competitive as well as more collaborative in delivering solutions to both employees and customers. Watch the session and see how you can standardize and simplify your company’s processes.
Briana MacIntyre, chief financial information officer at
BB&T, explained her ongoing financial transformation journey in the
session, “Pave the Way for Banking Transformation.” MacIntyre described how co-innovation with SAP helped her transform the way banks react to
regulations and the regulatory environment and how the acquired nimbleness is critical for reacting in real time. With SAP, MacIntyre was able to implement a
single scalable model for users, analytics, and operational recording, accelerating reporting cycles and remediating current needs associated with in-flight regulatory directives.
Bas van Amerom, information manager of sales at
AkzoNobel, and Kiran Koons, director at enterprise solutions at Bentley
Systems, knew that customer engagement was changing. In this session, “Take Customer Engagement to a Higher Level to Win Sales with the Cloud,” the leaders discussed how the SAP Cloud for Sales solution helped them redefine customer engagement with advanced relationship management, sales intelligence, and enterprise mobility. With the need to deliver omnichannel engagement and commerce in order to integrate and operate in real time, they explained how SAP helps them to seamlessly deliver intuitive, graphical views of their customers to better understand, engage, and win in their markets.
As customer centricity continues to shift banking strategies, innovative technology offers the opportunity for
enterprises to transform themselves and become more competitive and profitable.
Hear more of the keynotes, sessions, and interviews
from the SAPPHIRE NOW conference that cover today’s most incredible technology
topics. Browse the replays
now.
