Product lifecycle management has historically been manufacturing-centric, but product data has to be managed in all businesses. The use of PLM is growing in Financial and Business Services, where firms grow by creating new product offerings. PLM helps them, like manufacturers, speed time-to-market, reduce costs, share knowledge, and manage data complexity for better transparency and auditability.
Dassault Systèmes recently announced results of a survey of 458 senior asset and wealth managers, with total assets under management of $32 trillion, on digital transformation in their industry. A key finding was that 80% of the asset managers and 77% of the wealth managers said they expect digitization to partially or fully disrupt their industry within 10 years.
The survey, “Digitization of Asset and Wealth Management Promise and Pitfalls,” cites market drivers propelling digitization forward—cost pressures, calls for lower fees, emergence of low-cost passive funds, competition from fintech and Internet giants, and a new generation of digitally savvy investors.
BNP Paribas Securities Services has been an early adopter of digitization, using the 3DExperience platform—along with the platform’s Innovation Factory industry solution experience for Fund Management—to deploy PLM for end-to-end development of new products and innovations. Sebastien Messean, head of product lifecycle management at the asset servicing firm, said a PLM approach helps the company structure its offerings and keep operating costs in check.
The firm maintains a local presence in multiple countries to stay close to clients. It bring these globally dispersed teams together via the collaborative platform to develop new products more easily as a group, through better visibility and access to ideas and product information. Phillippe Ruault, head of clearing, settlement, and custom products, explained that this promotes innovation between the global teams and provides gives management full visibility into ongoing projects.
BNP Paribas Securities Services also digitized its product catalog, simplifying component reuse to quickly tailor new offerings for clients. “We now expect to reduce our time to market by 20%,” Ruault said.
That drives home the survey’s findings. “The key driver of digitization in the years to come will be changing client behaviors, under which financial services will evolve from being supply-led to demand-led,” said Amin Rajan, CEO at CREATE-Research, which conducted the survey for Dassault Systèmes. “This means that wealth management is at the dawn of a new transformation, more far reaching than anything experienced before. Digitization is not the first choice or the last choice; it is the only choice.”
BNP Paribas Securities Services is applying Dassault’s PLM and collaborative technologies across its business lines, including asset and fund services, clearing and custom services, corporate trust services, and marketing and finance services. This includes a dashboard that displays product ideas from clients, partners, and employees; competition and regulatory data; product data; client proposals and RFPs; and profitability, billing, and contractual information.
Through this information vista, “We have a consolidated, instantaneous view of each project and its evolution over time,” said Ruault. “We have 360 degree traceability.”
