CA's John Swainson Calls IT Essential to Driving Superior Customer Experience and Results in the Financial Services.

Swainson Keynotes at Foreword Financial Expo

CHICAGO -- John Swainson, president and chief executive officer of CA (NYSE: CA), today asserted that to ensure a superior customer experience and remain relevant in the marketplace, financial services providers must change the way they view technology and transform their IT environments.

In his keynote at the Foreword Financial Expo, entitled "The Customer Experience: A Powerful Competitive Edge," Swainson described how financial services firms can better serve customers by transforming their IT environments and described a strategy for achieving the transformation effectively.

"Customer experience in financial services is an electronic experience," said Swainson. "Consequently, IT is not only important to the business of financial services, increasingly IT is the business--it's all about the digital representation of currencies. The biggest threat to any company in any industry is irrelevancy. In an industry such as financial services where products and services are rapidly becoming commoditized, differentiation is vital to success."

"Moving the customer experience to where it needs to be requires nothing short of dynamic IT transformation," Swainson continued. "Companies have to transform IT management and re-architect IT infrastructure to support business processes. That's a challenge when companies have legacy IT systems built up over decades and often assembled through mergers and acquisitions."

Such legacy architectures impede sharing and reuse of application functionality, application integration, and the creation of hybrid applications that support up-selling and cross-selling of new value-added services to financial services customers.

"It's about extending the integration of business process management beyond silos to the enterprise level," said Swainson.

Financial Services Future State Architecture

Based on a long history of addressing the IT challenges of the financial services industry--the top 50 financial services companies in the world are customers--Swainson said, "CA looks at the industry in a different way."

"At CA, we've devised something we call the financial services future state architecture," said Swainson. "This is our concept of how IT architecture in financial services needs to evolve to meet the demands of providing superior customer experience."

The financial services future state architecture maps directly to CA's Enterprise IT Management (EITM) vision at four layers: Security Management, Infrastructure Optimization, IT Governance, and Business Service Management.

In the architecture:

* Common Business Services, such as Account Creation, and Common IT Services, such as Identity/Access Management and Workflow, are removed from individual applications and shared system-wide, enabling enterprise-wide Risk/Compliance Management and Reporting;

* Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Services Catalog provide consistent access to Common IT Services such as email and application services such as loans, payments, and deposits; and

* Transaction Data/Services allow for message-based exchanges between applications (internal and external), either via application invocation or via the SOA "bus." Network Services connect the multiple disparate hardware, database, and internal/external network components together.

CIOs play key role in improving the customer experience.

Swainson also said that "ensuring that IT supports the delivery of a superior customer experience is the responsibility of the CIO. CIOs must take the lead in improving the customer experience by transforming the organization."

"As the IT industry has grown, matured and increasingly consolidates, the CIO has moved from being viewed within the organization as a cost-center to being a navigator and translator of critical technologies and often a true strategic advisor," he said. "The next step is to assume a true strategic business role. The surest means of doing that is to take the lead in transforming the management of IT."

About CA

CA (NYSE: CA), one of the world's largest information technology (IT) management software companies, unifies and simplifies the management of enterprise-wide IT. Founded in 1976, CA is headquartered in Islandia, N.Y., and serves customers in more than 140 countries. For more information, please visit http://ca.com.

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