Product Silos Case Sudy
1. What are the issues associated with product silos
Westpac bank has approximately 80 applications to manage their core product functions and 100 more applications to provide additional capabilities. A core product application supports only a small number of products such as bank accounts, credit cards, investments etc. Delivery mechanism of the core product is tightly coupled in the core product application, thus resulting into a product silos. Figure 1 explains the product silos high level view of product silos.
Delivery Channel
Core Product Application
Core Product
Delivery Channel
Core Product Application
Core Product
Figure 1. Product applications in product silos Product silos like architecture cause serious implications for a bank.
Inconsistent Customer Experience:
As explained in the case study, the very evident disadvantage of product silos is inconsistent customer experience. For example if an existing customer of a bank walks into a branch, he/she is unable to get information about his/her investments.
Thus a single delivery channel (in this case branch) fails to give customer information about his/her products of the same bank.
Product silos also cause issues in various areas including business process and data:
Inability to assess customer’s profile:
Due to a product silos bank cannot get a complete a view of customer’s portfolio. This puts restriction on bank in assessing the customer’s real time risk profile. Inability to view customer’s real time portfolio can also result into the loss of sales opportunity.
Inefficient management of customer information
With the product silos, customer’s information with the bank is scattered across the various product applications. Collecting all the customer information from different product applications becomes a costly activity that uses more resources and time.
Duplication of information
Product silos results in maintaining the same information at multiple places. Different
Westpac bank has approximately 80 applications to manage their core product functions and 100 more applications to provide additional capabilities. A core product application supports only a small number of products such as bank accounts, credit cards, investments etc. Delivery mechanism of the core product is tightly coupled in the core product application, thus resulting into a product silos. Figure 1 explains the product silos high level view of product silos.
Delivery Channel
Core Product Application
Core Product
Delivery Channel
Core Product Application
Core Product
Figure 1. Product applications in product silos Product silos like architecture cause serious implications for a bank.
Inconsistent Customer Experience:
As explained in the case study, the very evident disadvantage of product silos is inconsistent customer experience. For example if an existing customer of a bank walks into a branch, he/she is unable to get information about his/her investments.
Thus a single delivery channel (in this case branch) fails to give customer information about his/her products of the same bank.
Product silos also cause issues in various areas including business process and data:
Inability to assess customer’s profile:
Due to a product silos bank cannot get a complete a view of customer’s portfolio. This puts restriction on bank in assessing the customer’s real time risk profile. Inability to view customer’s real time portfolio can also result into the loss of sales opportunity.
Inefficient management of customer information
With the product silos, customer’s information with the bank is scattered across the various product applications. Collecting all the customer information from different product applications becomes a costly activity that uses more resources and time.
Duplication of information
Product silos results in maintaining the same information at multiple places. Different