Financial services is an information-intensive industry full of hardware, software, data centres and telecommunications, all representing large cost centres. Some larger institutions lack clarity on the purpose of internal technology investments. The difference between being technologists and bankers who use technology wisely is in how you seek to reduce IT costs and maximise productivity. AArete has 25+ years of market intelligence experience understanding competitors’ pricing, benchmarks and demand management strategies. AArete always focuses on implementation, we’re with you from start to finish, and we guarantee our results.

In a highly regulated industry where legal cases can easily escalate into the billion-dollar range, spending on litigation – especially outside counsel – is rising. Working with your outside counsel to reduce that spending requires not only deep analytic capabilities, but also a nuanced understanding of the business of law. One way to reduce spend is by leveraging down commoditised, low-value work such as electronic discovery to the most junior people (or even offshore) – but first you need a legal spend analysis. With deep experience and a proven methodology, AArete can analyse invoices and provide actionable insights that guide your strategy. Our market intelligence gives us insight into how legal processes work and what your competitors are paying for similar legal tasks. The traditional hourly payment model is inherently inefficient. To pay for results rather than effort, thus aligning goals and sharing risk, some financial institutions are investigating value-based pricing, an alternative pricing methodology that rewards successful resolution of certain actions. However, many legal tasks are case-specific, meaning implementation of value-based pricing requires knowledge of which tasks (e.g., summary judgments, motions to dismiss) are common across many cases and the associated cost. .  Our advanced analytics provides cost saving opportunities for operational improvement on both internal business processes and management of outside legal counsel spend. Our approach is customisable to work with any matter management system to successfully improve data architecture, develop customised and scalable business intelligence and develop machine learning algorithms to predict future spend, isolate outliers or compare law firms.

The banking and financial services industry is seeing a technology-led transformation that is redefining the “norm” across a variety of its internal and customer-facing business processes. Large financial institutions need to adapt to this changing industry and competitive landscape, but are challenged by legacy systems and stringent regulatory protocols. AArete specialises in integrating new technologies with legacy systems and helping to reduce the risks of legacy through software re-modelling. Our capabilities and services are geared to blend with our customer’s to deliver innovative outcomes. We believe that combining our core data and technology engineering strengths in the latest techniques and tools with additional selected partner technology provides a strong base to assist our clients in dealing with the wider regulatory data landscape and digital opportunities that exist.We partner with some of the largest global and regional financial institutions, providing strategic and operational advisory and technical implementation support in driving their innovative FinTech, RegTech, payment processing and open banking initiatives.

Any financial transaction generates innumerable data points. Financial institutions are flooded with useful data. The data scientists at AArete’s Center of Data Excellence (CODE) take an analytical approach to providing expertise on how you can maximise your digital value with data that already exists. AArete offers primary support including: data gathering, cleansing, standardisation and extraction. Additionally: descriptive analytics, strategic support and progressive support, including machine learning and production of models, into everyday utilisation. 

Some of AArete’s offerings for financial institutions include:

Customer relationships: AArete can empower employees to make product recommendations at the point of interaction.

Transaction analysis: AArete teaches people how to monitor and track transaction information  to better understand customer needs, resulting in improved cross-selling.

Customer sentiment analysis: AArete leverages unstructured data analytics powered by social media to gauge customer valuations and emotions.

Payment channels: AArete helps capture and analyse data from new payment channels to better inform internal marketing strategy.

Segmentation & campaigns: using machine learning algorithms, AArete can build a detailed segmentation model that identifies, targets and tracks the performance of marketing campaigns.


Branch reporting: AArete sifts through data to better understand branch performance, sales and cash inflows.

In an industry as diverse as finance, companies must execute spend reduction across many categories. For example, retail banks need to look at facilities management, real-estate taxes, ATM maintenance service fees and armoured car costs and services – while larger institutions may be managing complex relationships among divisions, affiliates and vendors. AArete’s leaders have pioneered cross-industry strategic cost reduction methodologies over the last 25 years. We can provide visibility into operations that will ultimately reduce costs. These opportunities may take the form of automation of repetitive tasks, demand management, maximising the value of contracts or creating a culture of frugality.

Although each financial institution has a unique culture and approach to centralisation and outsourcing, any company can benefit from a third-party perspective on the process behind outsourcing, centralising, automating, digitising or fine-tuning business processes. Rather than impose a one-size-fits-all solution, AArete uses market intelligence and data analytics to help understand what your data says about your business processes. Our detailed assessment can lay a foundation for your outsourcing strategy, while our advisory services can help build a productive, scalable relationship with the vendor(s) of your choice. Our advanced analytics provides cost savings opportunities for operational improvement on both internal business processes and management of outside legal counsel spend. Our approach is customisable to improve data architecture or combine disparate data sources, develop customised and scalable business intelligence platforms, and/or develop machine learning algorithms to predict future spend, isolate outliers or compare law firms in various what-if scenarios.