A universal banking model. Traditionally, the revenue facing teams within a bank have been called the front office. Front office roles usually interact with the clients. As financial institutions have become larger interconnected, and more complex, the infrastructure roles that support the front office have grown from being support type roles to genuine partners of the business, playing their own critical role in the success of the organization. Infrastructure divisions perform control and service functions, and in particular, task relating to the organizational wide resource planning, steering and control, as well as to risk liquidity and capital management.
Critical infrastructure roles. Each organization will align their infrastructure roles slightly differently to the business. All financial institutions, however will have these functions. Technology, risk, internal audit, human resources, finance and legal and compliance. We'll look at each of these in detail in the next slides.
A huge dependence on banks on technology means that this function is likely to be very large while a large and complex infrastructure division at a high level, the use of technology in today's financial institutions has two main objectives. One, to enable lines of business to increase their revenues. For example an investment bank might use technology to allow and charge their institutional investors for direct market access. Two, technology drives internal efficiency and effectiveness within a bank. For an example an investment bank might use technology to allow straight through processing of their trades or a retail bank might use AI to make automated lending decisions on their mortgage applications.
Technology teams. Every bank will have different ways to arrange their technology teams which will be driven by its organizational structure. But broadly speaking, IT teams fall into one of four categories. Service management are specialists who ensure the day-to-day use of technology across the bank continues uninterrupted. Business analysis teams are scoping out and implementing new technology requirements. Quality assurance testing is the process of verifying and assuring the quality of software, applications and infrastructure before it's fully implemented. Software engineers are tasked with designing, developing and deploying effective solutions across the bank. For example software engineers will design solutions to protect the bank from IT security threats.
