WHY DID WE DO IT?
There are days when we sit down and ask ourselves why? The answer is simple – we thought there was a better way to do business. The core team that established Petra Financial have worked in the banking software and reference data industries for many years. We haven’t seen it all – or done it all – but we have all seen the same old tired business models and approach to business being rolled out time and time again, wearing a new suit of clothes, but still the same old guy underneath!
Times have really changed. Technologies are developed at incredible speed, future proof doesn’t mean ten years any more and new functionality and great ideas come along at the speed of light. Highly skilled and innovative technical guys are developing tools and applications that need to see the light of day.
The old model of building monolithic applications requires vendor lock-in and lacks interaction with either the user or the rest of your applications. Removing them entirely then entails great expense, exposure, risk and, let’s face it, pain – all so that your vendor can get a return on an investment on a system that took years to build.
We think that approach is illogical and needs to be replaced by a service oriented, component driven approach that allows you to leverage your IT investment and keep it current without spending a fortune.
Our customers need to differentiate through customer service, great products, processing efficiency and cost effective and timely delivery in order to retain clients in an ever more commoditized and frictionless world.
What they don’t need is a two or three year implementation full of cost, risk and huge capital expenditure, that is already surpassed by the next big thing when it goes live and then costs a fortune in time and money to re-engineer to add the latest functionality.
At Petra we see things differently. We looked at this and said, “If we were the customer, what would we want, how would we want it delivered and how do we create a culture that can do that?”
What we came up with was this:
- Solutions that actually leverage your existing investment in legacy systems
- Solutions that don’t over burden an already taxed IT department that has heard just about every reason why this will be a quick and easy implementation, followed by every excuse under the sun when it is not.
- Solutions that give the business guys the opportunity to increase customer service levels and reduce costs to maximise margins and revenues
- Solutions that allow product management and IT to introduce new products and functionality quickly and efficiently
- Software as a service (SaaS), whether it is hosted or deployed internally within the bank. Don’t rip it out – augment it with the functionality and flexibility you need in your business.
- Give our clients information, not data and when we have given them information allow them to manipulate it in the way that they need in order to get the MIS they want, not what we tell them they want
- Forget licence fees and annual maintenance with up front risk and capital expenditure procedures. Pay for it out of operating costs, paying only for what you need and use, using a simple sliding scale that allows you to control your costs
- Offer a simple service that gives you an automatic upgrade path for the life of your deal and access to all the latest functionality that is backward compatible with your previous versions.
So, that’s why we did it. We were all as bored with the old way of working that we believe our clients are and we aim to change the way other people offer their services and serve their clients.