Birmingham Midshires

The Requirement

In order to protect its market position in a highly competitive and increasingly volatile marketplace, BM Solutions must respond quickly to market changes, economic conditions, market regulation and of course, its competitors.

Getting new products to market quickly is key to staying ahead of the competition, but with hundreds of mortgage products on offer, this can be a time consuming process. In addition, online and offline product information must be updated quickly and comply with FSA regulations.

Recognising the opportunities for Birmingham Midshires to improve efficiency, its speed of response to market changes and ease regulatory compliance, Amatica developed the mortgage product lifecycle system.

The Solution

The solution is a web based mortgage product release system that enables BM's product development and marketing teams to publish and launch new mortgage products from one central repository, containing shared data and common procedures.

Users are able to build and publish complete mortgage products, applying the relevant interest rates, discounts, incentives, fees, etc. This information can then be used to populate BM's websites and product information literature.

Additional modules enable the creation of product comparison charts and tables, electronic PDF documents and XML for external data feeds.

The system facilities the production of mortgage advertisements, promotional material and website content to meet the Financial Services Authority's (FSA) compliance guidelines.

Workflow functions bring together business processes across product development, compliance and marketing departments to improve the speed and control of product launches and withdrawals. A detailed audit trail tracks all changes to a product.

The Outcome

Amatica's mortgage product lifecycle system reduces costs and improves speed to market for BM Solutions' range of mortgages. It meets the needs of marketeers, product designers and compliance officers reducing time, effort and cost.

• The benefits include:
• Significant cost savings
• Enables marketing team to control content and update information
• Ensures compliance with FSA mortgage promotion rules
• Enables rapid reaction to BoE/LIBOR base rate changes
• Automatically generated PDF reports do not have to be separately stored or updated
• Reduces or removes product literature printing & distribution costs
• Publish new products across all media channels
• Manage information from multiple providers
• Generate compliant marketing documents quickly

Jamie Walker, BM Solutions' eCommerce team leader is enthusiastic saying,

"I could visualise the potential when Amatica presented their original concepts and ideas. Together, Amatica and BM have refined the system to more closely map our business needs."