Zühlke brings greater scalability to financial services company, three+one

The challenge

three+one helps the US public sector and higher education institutions to manage and maximise the value of their cash.

Its liquidity analysis tool, cashVest, gives clients invaluable insights into where they can earn more interest, reduce costs, and gain efficiencies.

But there was a clear opportunity to evolve the tool to drive operational efficiencies and deliver more value to clients.

Client reports were not available electronically, for example, and clients and staff had to exchange information via phone or email as there was no customer portal.

What’s more, three+one staff had to manually input data into the backend system to run the analysis, and then invest hours per month creating each client’s PDF report.

three+one was therefore looking to drive better client and business outcomes. It believed that the development of a client portal that enabled electronic reporting was the best place to start.

What we did

Impressed from the outset by our approach, three+one chose us from a pool of potential partners to be their design and engineering partner.

From our first conversation, through to the Discovery phase and beyond, our focus was on the need to uncover the problem and solve it with the right solution. We knew that driving the best outcomes would require more than simply building something we were instructed to build.

With this approach, the project scope evolved from designing and building a portal, to defining and delivering a programme of continuous improvement designed to:

• Grow and scale the business through enhanced client services.
• Deliver added value to clients with the right tools and information to address their specific needs.
• Drive operational efficiencies and eliminate manual processes.

The results

The improvements we’re making to three+one’s technical architecture, data strategy, and digital products are helping the business to achieve business growth, scalability, operational efficiencies, and added value for clients.

Here are some of the highlights:

• The enhancements we're making to three+one's data architecture, systems, and ways of working help the business improve operational efficiencies and scalability.
• Clients can export their analyses directly by logging into the new online cashVest portal. This self-serve approach saves three+one staff approximately 3-4 hours per report and removes the burden of creating PDFs manually.
• three+one no longer has to ensure 100% accuracy before ingesting treasury data. This is thanks to improved functionality deployed by Zühlke, which allows users to edit ingested data and therefore re-run analysis seamlessly.
• For the first time, three+one's clients have a real-time single view of all their accounts across multiple banks. This is automatically updated once new data is ingested.
• three+one staff no longer need to use multiple third-party tools to collaborate on client reports. With cashVest, staff can edit client reports effortlessly, in a single place, and simply publish to clients when ready.