Financial Services

From the prosperous 90’s through the current turbulent economy, we have seen unprecedented growth and expansion in the financial markets, technology sector and global ventures, all to be jeopardized by the industry’s lack of controls, misguided initiatives and mismanagement of technical infrastructure and system platforms.  Enterprise Iron strives to help clients evade the many of these business misfortunes plaguing some of the largest companies in the world today with the services and solutions we provide.  We will not only help you build a solid business format and system infrastructure to improve your product and service offerings, but we’ll prepare you for any business climate that could create risk and threat to your company and your customers.

Our Focus
 
Enterprise Iron focuses on business management services and technical and system solutions.  We have strategically partnered with international processing and development firms to leverage their expertise in our offerings to ensure the services and solutions provided give you the competitive edge needed in today’s global market.  Our services have been sought after by mutual fund and brokerage firms, insurance companies, banking institutions and benefits administration firms.  

Our Services

Our services are an extension of our experience. In order to distinguish ourselves from the other consulting firms, we stick to what we know and do it well. Enterprise Iron consultants are extensively trained in the following services: 
 

Relationship Sourcing

  • Client Management
    • We will be the front person between your operations team and client to ensure all services are fulfilled and expectations met. 
  • Merger & Acquisition Integration Consulting
    • We can provide analysis, design, development and implementation for any business and system component of your M&A project.
  • Vendor Evaluations and Management
    • Allow us to use our experience in the industry to interview and evaluate all vendors servicing your firm. 

Business Continuity

  • Business Continuity Planning
    • We will prepare a logistical plan for your firm to recover and restore interrupted critical data and functions.
  • Disaster Recovery Strategy
    • We will work with you to evaluate and develop a strategy to recover and resume system applications, data, hardware and communications.

Operational Services

  • New Product Delivery, Strategies and Process
    • Our experience with many products used by the industry leaders will enable us to point out key requirements to ensure your product has a competitive edge.
  • Reconciliation and Audit Support
    • From reviewing data processing and reconciling demographic and financial transactions to a full SAS 70 Audit, we can ensure your processing steps, transaction output and internal controls are in balance.
  • Funds Transfer and Trade Settlement
    • Our team will process your mutual fund and brokerage account transactions and ensure they are reconciled and meet the appropriate settlement date based on the fund’s trading rules.
       
    • A sample of fund trading systems we have experience working with are:
      • Longview
      • Charles River
      • Murex
      • Minerva
      • Summit

 

  • Trust, Master Trust and Global Custody
    • Whether you need to implement a new core accounting system to handle high levels of on-line trading or help with improving your custody market position by enhancing your processing and operational capabilities, our consultants have the experience.
    • Systems we have experience on are:
      • Global Plus
      • OmniTrust
      • Metavante
      • Trac 3000
      • Am Trust
      • Multifond
  • Corporate Actions
    • Any initiative your firm has, whether it is from a business or technical aspect, our consultants are ready to analyze, design and implement a solution that helps you meet your goal on time and within budget.
       
  • SWIFT Processing
    • We will manage your data processing interfaces between financial institutions in Europe and North America.
  • Business Processing Reengineering
    • Our consultants use many methodologies, such as Six Sigma and the Rational Unified Process, to add efficiency and effectiveness to your business process.
       

Technology Services

  • Technology Development Process Controls
    • Our consultants will assist with your new technology development initiative. We’ll help you establish processes and set the controls needed to ensure the technology is correctly installed, being utilized to its fullest capability, and meets your company’s technical needs for the future.
    • Our consultants have experience using
      • Rational Unified Process – RUP
      • Agile Methodologies
      • Microsoft Solutions Framework
      • System Development Life Cycle - SDLC
  • Platform Integration
    • Our consultants work on many systems and platforms and know firsthand the steps needed to complete a platform integration. Whether you need full integration services or resources to address key tasks such as linking front and middle office systems, syncing system and operational workflows or reconciling data across systems, our consultants are prepared to help you.
  • Business Process Re-engineering
    • Our consultants will enable you to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the business processes that exist within and across your organization. Our BPR experience allows us to look at your existing business processes end-to-end and determine how we can best re-engineer the processes in order to improve how your firm conducts business.
  • Software Selection and Installation
    • Our consultants work with many software vendors and the companies who purchase their software. This experience allows us to see firsthand the compatibility of the many software tools on the market today, which software is best suited to meet your company’s system requirements, and the steps needed for a successful install with minimal disruption to your business.
  • Business Intelligence Analytics
    • "The Gartner Group predicts that due to lack of information, processes, and tools, through 2012, more than 35 per cent of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets." - "Gartner Reveals Five Business Intelligence Predictions for 2009 and Beyond"
    • Enterprise Iron consultants have experience with the needed skills, technologies, applications and practices to help your business acquire a better understanding of its data and applications. Our services will assist you with data mining, data warehousing, performance measurement and setting benchmarks to help your company meet the competitive challenges in the market today.
    • Our consultants have experience on the following systems:
      • Netezza
      • Ab Inito
      • Cognos
      • MicroStategy
         
  • Web Presence and Integration
    • A well-designed web site and interactive portal is critical to a company’s ability to service their customer while defining their products and services in the marketplace. Let our web specialists assist you in designing your website, hone your marketing message, provide the latest trends in portal utilities and integrate your data with external partners.
    • Portal Development tools we have experience with are: IBM, BEA WebLogic, PeopleSoft

Quality Assurance Services

  • Our testing services aim to verify that the product functions as expected, regardless of whether it has been internationalized or localized, or not. Functional testing can be performed on any language version of the product. In early stages of the product globalization lifecycle, functionality testing is most typically completed on the source language version of the product.
  • Functional testing helps to find defects early in the overall product development process. Integration testing can be included, which will assess how well different components of the product function together after they have been tested individually.

  • The functionality testing service we provide most often are:
    • Pairwise Testing
    • Acceptance Testing
    • Use Case Testing
    • Stress Testing
    • Load Testing
    • Regression Testing
    • Compatibility Testing
    • Interoperability Testing

  • Pairwise Testing
    A technique designed to analyze each test case in order to arrive at the optimal number of discrete combinations to cover everything that is needed, while at the same time minimizing the effort and cost of such testing.

  • Acceptance Testing
    This is the formal type testing which considers user needs, requirements and business processes, and is conducted to determine whether a system satisfies the acceptance criteria. It enables the users, customers or other authorized entity to decide whether or not to accept the system. The purpose is to evaluate with authority the system's adherence to the requirements.

  • Use Case Testing
    This is a technique in which test cases are designed to execute user scenarios. The purpose of this testing technique is to do what a user would do. This testing aims to assess the tested product in a real-world environment from the user perspective. Rather than always working with a detailed set of test cases, users/testers test the product using more broadly defined scenarios.

    While ad-hoc testing - one extreme case of user scenario testing - is typically "exploratory" and random, and completed only once (unless a specific defect is found), use case testing is typically a more continuous "start-to-finish" approach. The purpose of this testing is to help uncover functionality issues which might not be immediately obvious to the product developers, or to assess the product's functionality as perceived by end users/customers.

    For some software developers, use case testing is considered a crucial and critical part of their overall testing approach, while others prefer to focus on other types of testing that verify the product's functionality in real-world scenarios.

  • Stress Testing
    The objective of this type of testing is to evaluate a product or its component and how it behaves at or beyond the limits of its anticipated or specified workloads, or with reduced availability of resources such as access to memory or servers. The purpose is to test how the product behaves under limited resources.

  • Load Testing
    Performed in an emulated real-world environment, the purpose of this testing type is to assess the product's functionality under certain "pressure" conditions (such as a networked product with 100, 1,000, or 10,000 active users), and to determine how well the product meets desired performance goals.

  • Regression Testing
    Regression testing provides for re-testing a new release (or "drop") of the product, which contains previously fixed issues and bugs. Regression testing can also be performed between individual language versions to ensure defects from one language are fixed, or even prevented, in other language versions of the product as part of the localization testing cycle.

  • Compatibility and Interoperability Testing
    These testing solutions are designed to verify that products will function as expected on a wide variety of hardware, software, and network configurations. Testing is performed on a specific combination of platforms or operating systems, running on defined set of hardware configurations. Compatibility testing can also be performed to assess the backward compatibility of the current version with previous legacy versions of the product, or its cooperation with other related software products.