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Success Stories
VISTA has been fortunate over the years to assist a number of very
distinguished and highly visible
clients. We describe the nature of our
assignments here being careful to protect our client's
identity. If you
are
interested in knowing more about any one of these assignments please
Contact
Us.
Front-to-Back Trade Capture
Implemented a front-to-back trade capture, risk management,
processing
and accounting system for emerging market debt
options.
VISTA resources directed and coordinated user acceptance
testing.
Responsibilities included:
 | Developing an approach to system
implementation and integration |
| Developing test plans to assess
whether the system was sufficiently
robust |
| Managing the reconciliation of trade data
between the legacy and target
systems |
| Process review of the current process environment |
| Re-engineering of processing in the
post-implementation environment |
VISTA managed the relationship between the business analysts,
system
developers, and the user community, which comprised front
office, middle
office, operations and financial control in both New
York and London.
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SAP General Ledger Conversion
VISTA was engaged by the client to provide advisory services in the
Bank-wide strategic planning for an execution of a SAP general
ledger
conversion. Services provided included:
| Prioritizing tasks, identifying critical issues, providing input
from
business/operational perspectives and supervising
sign-off of user testing |
| Performing analysis for both general ledger accounts and
cost centers |
| Instituting general ledger account and cost center
maintenance policy
and procedures |
| Identifying and reconciling all inter-company accounts |
| Coordinating development of an
automated and fully
compliant balance
sheet reconciliation process, including
both policies and procedures |
| Providing interface between senior management,
end-users and programmers
to build up, enhance,
and optimize financial, operational, and management
reporting |
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Improve Bank Operations
Managed New York bank operations portion of global initiative to:
| Review operations processing |
| Identify gaps in control |
| Propose both short and long term remedies |
| Support disaster recovery requirements |
The disaster recovery documentation included sections on daily
processing
and the determination of critical processes for recovery
site processing under
multiple scenarios. This document was used
as a model for other areas
within the bank.
During an engagement at another large Bank, Vista identified a re
engineering opportunity that led to migrating a formerly bank wide
manual suspense tracking and aging process to an automated Recon
system. Without adding any additional licensing costs, the Bank
was
able to reduce a number of FTEs and provide MIS reporting not possible
before.
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Historical Trading Database
Designed and developed a non-trivial database for historical use
and
reporting for the Compliance department of one of the top Wall
Street firms.
| Collected and reported daily global trade activity |
| Developed efficient search mechanisms to
support ad-hoc data queries |
| Developed system security measures to protect
the firm's most sensitive
information |
| Improved accuracy and presentation of
Investment Banking's portfolio
data
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Energy Service Billing
System
Developed a contingency billing system in 3 weeks to keep the
client
company from going out of business while outsourced billing
relationship
issues were addressed. System was operational for
four months. Work
included:
| Parsing data from several input sources including EDI |
| Defining structures for core customer data |
| Integrating the usage data with core customer information |
| Formatting the data according to specifications for a third
party to
physically produce customer’s paper bill |
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Year 2000 Remediation
Defined and documented the process that a major financial
institution
used to manage all of their Global Year 2000 remediation
projects.
Material developed addressed all phases of a Year 2000
project and was
developed to get Project Managers up and running
quickly. Information
included templates showing typical activities,
planning steps, reporting
requirements, documenting assessment
details and documenting test cases.
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Establish Project Office
Proposed an appropriate structure for a Project Office at a major
New York
Bank. The Project Office would be responsible for
delivery and
integration of new functionality into two global product
suites as well as
ensuring Y2K compliance. The primary concern
was getting accurate
information about the bank's past project
failures and successes in a short
time frame while also assessing
where the need for strengthening project management efforts
existed. Tasks included:
| Gaining credibility in a tight time frame and
overcoming resistance to
our presence |
| Developing a project assessment questionnaire |
| Interviewing, listening and documenting our
notes of key project group
members |
| Summarizing our findings and recommending a solution |
On the strength of our process and write-ups alone we received
contracted
work from another company looking to establish their
own Project Office.
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Web Site Design
This site was developed solely by VISTA resources using
Microsoft's
FrontPage 2000.
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Client / Server Conversion
After merging with another bank, a major New York City Bank
needed help in
determining ways to reduce their annual cost of $22
million to produce
customer bills. There was also a strong desire
to migrate legacy
mainframe applications to a more flexible
development platform. Steps
taken:
| Understand the functional work performed
within the Billing area |
| Produce a conceptual model of the existing system |
| Estimate the complexity of each functional component |
| Developed a rough project plan -
% activity per SDLC per functional
component |
| Costs were estimated using a constructive
cost model for each function |
| A five year cost projection was produced for
four alternative approaches |
| Made recommendation to use switch to
client / server environment |
The chosen alternative proposed migrating hard to maintain legacy
applications to a
client/server architecture running on Unix and using
Oracle
for the database. Provided a self funding avenue by diverting
new development
funds from within their existing budget ultimately
reducing annual expenses by
$11 million (48%) in three years.
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Bank Merger Support
This Bank and the word ‘merger’ seem to go hand and hand. Vista
staff has been used repeatedly as resources in all their recent endeavors
Our
involvement has primarily been in the reconciliation area ensuring
that
transactions and balances from the originating Bank have been
‘bridged’
properly to the target Bank’s books as dictated by reference
information.
To accomplish this goal, Vista personnel have combined
their efforts
with the Bank’s staff to implement server based (Recon Plus)
and mainframe
matching solutions to automatically identify ‘breaks’
resulting from
either incorrect or incomplete reference data.
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Multi-currency
General Ledger Implementation
This project allowed a client Bank the opportunity to dramatically
reduce
maintenance costs by decommissioning an expensive mainframe system
that they had inherited as the result of one of its mergers. Vista staff
became
so familiar with the new system that we are still used by the client as SMEs
when operational issues arise.
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BAU Production Support
Besides project implementations, one Bank uses Vista resources
to
supplement its G/L operations staff in BAU activities.
When it made a
strategic decision to outsource much of its operations to India, Vista
consultants provided the resources to ‘back fill’ day to day activities.
This allowed the Bank staff to concentrate their efforts exclusively on
the
transition which went seamlessly.
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Risk Mitigation
After this large Bank acquired a leasing company, it uncovered numerous
accounting differences that put the Bank at risk to a possible 33 million
dollar write-off. Utilizing Recon
Plus as one its tools, Vista and Bank staff
members were able to identify
actual differences, do the necessary research,
and resolve most of them with
the final write-off number being under 4 million.
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Trade Confirmations
Systems Review
This Trade confirmation project at a large Bank had two
phases
| In the first phase, the team was charged with reconciling, researching,
and
resolving the numerous outstanding breaks and rejects that had been
aging prior to the start of the project
|
| With the exceptions under control, the team's emphasis switched
to
ascertaining what relevant data could be implemented in the standard
confirmation documents using feeds directly from various legacy mainframe
systems. |
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