DTCC Expands the Customer Dialogue on Quality

After reaching out to eight major financial services firms, DTCC joined forces with them to create the Financial Services Business Trans-formation Roundtable.

The roundtable provides a quarterly forum for the industry’s reengineering, quality and business improvement professionals to share best practices in areas including the deployment of quality programs, change management, innovation and performance measurement tools. The group, which now numbers more than 25 member firms, has met twice this year.

A seat at the roundtable

With the roundtable up and running, DTCC customers now have a forum for working together to achieve cross-industry gains in process management, according to Karim Houry, DTCC vice president, Business Reengineering and Quality.

“Many of our customers have successful, innovative quality and business transfor-mation programs,” Houry said. “The roundtable gathers their and other financial services firms’ collective expertise into one room to share ideas, best practices and industry challenges. We are confident that bringing together these quality and reengineering leaders will benefit individual firms and their customers, as well as DTCC and the industry.”

Initial impressions of the roundtable are positive. “The group is proving to be a great resource for those of us in the industry who focus on improving business operations,” said Todd Gibson, vice president, Morgan Stanley. “The ability to share personal experiences and discuss emerging strategies with a network of process improvement professionals will help raise the level of process performance across the industry as a whole.”

James Halloran, vice president, Pershing, agrees. “It’s been extremely valuable to network with peers from other financial services companies who are trying to achieve the same goals that Pershing is focused on,” he said. “The challenges are similar and learning how peer firms tackle these issues has had a positive influence on how I approach service excellence for our company.”

Roundtable’s charter

In addition to sharing best practices, the roundtable’s objectives include:

• Exploring solutions for industry-wide challenges;
• Performing benchmarking studies in areas of common interest;
• Networking and partnering on initiatives when judged appropriate.

Already, various roundtable members are partnering with DTCC. Some participated in workshops sponsored by DTCC and the Breakthrough Management Group that focused on innovation; upcoming training programs will include business process management. Other customers are looking to participate in joint process-improvement initiatives with DTCC.

Sigma reports for the industry

In another customer-focused initiative on the quality front, DTCC is disseminating Six Sigma data to the industry in the form of “Sigma report cards,” a tool that rates performance levels on key industry Asset Services processes. The goal is to bring further efficiencies to shared processes.

“Over the past eight years, we have realized significant, sustainable gains in customer service, process efficiency and cost-cutting within DTCC, thanks to our quality initiatives,” said John Colangelo, DTCC managing director, Operations and Business Reengineering. “Now we want to multiply these gains by forging Six Sigma partnerships across our industry, which has a tradition for being highly collaborative on the infrastructure side of the business. The goal is to resolve defects and errors that occur in mutually related processes.” DTCC is seeking opportunities to partner with customers as well as with industry servicers, agents, vendors and data providers.

The initial report card focuses on The Depository Trust Company’s processing of periodic principal and income payments for structured securities issues. “We are sharing this information to raise awareness on payment issues for structured securities and to support greater accuracy and timeliness throughout the industry, including the issuer, servicer and underwriter communities,” said Peter Gleeson, DTCC vice president, Asset Services.
The report card can be found on DTCC’s corporate website (www.dtcc.com) under Asset Services. In the near future, DTCC will post report cards for other Asset Services processes.

To raise industry awareness of DTCC’s quality program, the organization launched a webcast titled “Six Sigma, the Method of Champions.” The 15-minute webcast provides a brief overview of Six Sigma, how it is used at DTCC and the externalization initiative. To view it, visit www.dtcc.com and click the Asset Services or Quality links. @

[For more information on DTCC’s Six Sigma externalization program, contact Karim Houry at khoury@dtcc.com or 212.855.5134.]