Landscape of Portals Today
The current state of portal development is at a very exciting stage. Key portal technology leaders like Liferay have ensured a massive adoption of portals on an enterprise level, thanks to its intuitive interface and wide range of functionalities. Some of the popular ways in which portals are integrated into enterprise business systems include:
1. Sites (Intranets and Extranets)
2. Social Communities
3. Web and Enterprise Content
4. Contextual Enterprise Search
5. Business and Operational Insights and Analytics Platforms
6. Business Applications
Challenges to Portal Development
With widespread adoption, there are certain factors that limit the BFSI sector’s ability to fully utilize the functionality of Liferay in their daily scheme of things. The reasons could be one or more of the below:
1. Budgetary constraints
2. Reluctance to move away from costly legacy systems
3. Lesser speed to Deployment
4. Regulatory and Compliance constraints
5. Challenges in managing different data sources
Gartner predicts that by 2017 more than one-fourth of the companies will lose their existing market positions due to incompetence in managing digital business. This blog looks at ways in which players in the BFSI segment can utilize the power of Liferay to not only maintain but improve their market position, with the aid of several use cases catering exclusively to this domain.
Key components of BFSI portal
Some of the infrastructure components of BFSI centric portals include –
a. System Applications
b. High degree of Security
c. SSO convenience
d. Adherence to Regulatory requirements
e. Administration of the system
They have the ability to provide interactive features such as
a. Smart Content Management
b. Responsive to stakeholders’ needs
c. Quick Search facility
d. Social angle that encourages cross-company Collaboration and Idea Sharing
e. A more efficient and user friendly CRM
f. Seamless integration with the back-end
The key stakeholders that can benefit with enormous improvement in efficiency include Sales and Marketing, IT staff, Finance team, Client Accounts, Partners and Vendors.
Types of Portal Relevant to BFSI
The below types of portal solutions can be easily deployed using Liferay.
a. Intranet
b. Online Banking Portal
c. Company Extranet
d. Idea/ Innovation Management Portal
e. Community Portal for customers
f. Customized Portals such as Quote Portal or Insurance Portal
g. Knowledge Management Systems
h. Sentiment and Trend Analysis
Typical Portal Requirements
The portal system developed and deployed on Liferay can meet the below requirements with ease:
1. Richer and deeply personalized user interface, faster access and mobile ready system
2. Reliable Security through advanced token based authentication
3. Amazingly responsive across screen sizes and form factors
4. Works for concurrent and total users
5. Helps generate insightful reports that make decision making smarter
6. In spite of having powerful features, the system is light enough to load in less than 3 secs
Case Studies
1. Financial Products Portal
With the aim to propel brand visibility and user efficiency, a US based Financial Investment Research Firm approached us for developing a financial products portal. They wanted to overcome the shortcomings of existing systems such as outdated UI, multiple levels of access leading to security flaws and inefficient search.
Our Liferay based financial solutions used advanced token based security systems on a mobile ready, responsive, personalized User Interface and was able to support 45,000 users and enable access to 90,000 reports with an impressive page load time of less than 3 seconds. The outcomes were richer UI experience and responsiveness – supporting various devices and screen resolutions. Customer satisfaction improved with better visibility of content & features, and faster access to meaningful data and reports along with better search capabilities.
2. Idea Management Portal
A leading bank in the US needed a better system for its loan processing division to promote innovation and ideas across the 281,000 strong workforce to provide better service to over 70 million customers.
We enabled smooth migration of backend from MySQL to Oracle, and Liferay Tomcat webserver to Liferay JBoss application server. We also enabled integration with SSO and created a Meeting Management System with a rich user interface for the portal.
As an outcome, the number of ideas and suggestions shot up by 100% that outperformed every other division in the bank.
3. Quote Portal
A $400 million US based Insurance company needed a safe and reliable Quote Management System and connected with CIGNEX for this need. We standardized the Digital Marketing Platform across all web brands with easy content sharing and powerful reusability. We also provided a powerful CMS for every web brand, that put the marketing team in charge and helped capture more leads.
The outcome was a direct jump in efficiency of Quote Creation by 500%, and a 500% reduction in quote preparation/turnaround time.
4. Intranet
Intranets can act as Digital Employee Engagement Portals enabling Employee Collaboration, Engagement and higher productivity within an enterprise, through a well thought and visually alluring Liferay based platform.
5. Collaboration Portal
The use of portal as a knowledge asset drives superior value in a people oriented or process driven organization. It helps break down silos, allows far reaching interaction and encourages innovative mindset with idea sharing, tech support community and organization wide information percolation.
If you are a Banking and Financial Institutions looking to leverage Open Source technologies for your portal needs, then Liferay is the gateway to achieving increased engagement not only within the enterprise but also with end customers, partners and vendors.
Do write to us and leave your comments on this blog.
