services

Monitoring Maturity Program

Digitalization has made it imperative for organizations to develop comprehensive enterprise-wide monitoring programs that utilize new approaches to customer and end user experience, infrastructure visibility and data analysis to provide accurate and real-time detection and incident response. One of the first major challenges in implementing a continuous monitoring program is defining the objectives, future-proof functional requirements and a migration strategy.

We offer a range of technical and advisory services with the industry-leading Dynatrace Platform as the foundation. Upon this foundation, we integrate platforms such as Stackstorm and ServiceNow, allowing you automatically trigger remedial actions so that problems are resolved before your customers and end users are impacted. Each project is assigned a Client Success Manager to ensure that all project objectives are met.

Reconciliation

All over the world, large consumer and volume-driven businesses are seeing an increase in regulation, digital transaction volumes, dispute resolution and financial complexity. The manual Microsoft Excel-based reconciliation processes used by most businesses are slow, expensive and prone to both mistakes and fraud. Furthermore, MS Excel does not provide an audit trail that shows how the balance sheet was derived.The increasing use of channels, the integration of disparate systems and the high levels of automation has made leading reconciliation solutions evolve into “Financial Control &Performance Management” solutions.

Matching of transactions on a one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one or many-to-many basis is now a hygiene factor. Nathan Claire’s consultants have the expertise required to configure adaptive reconciliation rules that enforce your financial controls, ensure regulatory compliance, protect your bottomlines, reduce financial risk, perform revenue assurance, protect against fraud and allow you complete the financial close and recognize income earlier.

Fintech Initiatives

Lending to “thin file” customers is projected to be worth US$ 3T globally. Already, lenders in Kenya are disbursing over USD 20m daily. New initiatives in Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Nigeria are also experiencing strong growth but demand is still far greater than supply. Current data sources that lenders use to score customers fail for unbanked, new and young customers.Nathan Claire offers a comprehensive platform that allows existing and new players execute an aggressive Fintech play. Our platform uses new sources of data to underwrite consumer loans in emerging markets.

Our algorithms score both “ability to repay” and “willingness to repay”, allowing lenders offer risk-adjusted pricing to avoid adverse selection. In addition, borrowing privileges can be linked to a customer’s saving and transacting habits. Our experts have hands-on experience managing loan portfolios, and can work with lenders to define and execute successful and scale-driven Fintech strategies that boost deposit mobilization while minimizing loan defaults.

Analytics

The big data generated by the software products and services that Nathan Claire provides gives our clients access and insight to valuable business and performance analytics. It takes us a few days to provide customized reports and dashboards that address your blindspots, fill knowledge gaps that may have existed for years, uncover hidden patterns and seasonality in your business, and help you ask the right questions of the big data that your business and partners generate.

Complex customer, channel and device dashboards are available at the click of a button. ETL, Big Data, Predictive Analytics and Visualization capabilities have been integrated and tuned for optimal performance in a single platform supported by one vendor. For continuous improvement, input and learnings from customers and industry players across the world are captured in an on-going process and built into our Analytics solutions.

Big Data Management

By design and as a result of client requests, Nathan Claire has developed a set of strategies, tools and capabilities for the acquisition and management of big data. If data is the new gold, then Nathan Claire is the partner you need to understand the business value and relevant insights behind every bit of data that comes your way.

This is achieved using tools that perform necessary calculations such as Information Value (IV) and Weight of Evidence (WOE). We can work with your strategy teams to identify and interface to sources of relevant data, extract, unpack and enrich this data into formats that support your business objectives.

Scorecard Development

We help clients build scoring algorithms based on self-learning neural networks, allowing them inject automated decisioning anywhere in your business processes on batched or real-time basis. Scorecards can be used to classify customers, predict outcomes, associate observed behaviour with known patterns, or cluster customers based on hidden attributes. Any required subjectivity in the decisioning can be automated using a flexible and extensible business rules engine.

Our consultants have built scorecards that assign borrowing limits based on each borrower’s headroom, predict the probability of default, willingness to repay loans, application fraud, cross-sell and up-sell opportunities so your marketing teams can address optimal targets for each product, the collectability of delinquent loans, self-curing delinquent loans and the most effective methods for collecting. Scorecards can be aggregated using dual matrix, vector and score banding approaches to handle various degrees of complexity or thought.

AIOps Enablement

The complexity of managing modern IT environments means that productivity suffers, since the best resources are assigned to solving problems rather than innovation. To overcome this dilemma, leading organizations are moving towards zero-touch AIOps-driven IT operations management.

Nathan Claire’s teams have empowered some of the leading organizations in Africa to gain traction on the AIOps strategy execution, addressing various problem remediation, cost management, capacity planning, process optimization, workforce management and revenue assurance use cases along the way.

AI-generated alerts, insights and analytics are fed into an IT automation platform to turn complex technical tasks into repeatable playbooks. Sitting at the centre of it all, the AI engine provides visibility into performance and dependencies across all environments, intelligently extracts the root cause of failures and degradations, and sends the appropriate code to trigger automated routines that fix problems or close loops with customers. Your best-practice protocols for software or hardware provisioning, configuration management, application deployment/roll-backs, cloud and container configuration, network device configuration, firewall configurations, security patches, etc can be automatically run on Unix, Linux and Windows servers.

Opinion leaders consider AIOps to be the future of IT operations management and the solutions that Nathan Claire offer form the cornerstone of a successful AIOps program.

Chaos Engineering

Chaos Engineering builds resilience into your interdependent transaction processing environments by identifying and resolving vulnerabilities that could lead to performance degradation or catastrophic collapse in the event of component failure. It proactively ensures that your technology environment is engineered to withstand unexpected disruptions that will impact your revenues and your brand, and divert your best minds away from innovation and productivity.

Nathan Claire’s subject matter experts will work with your SRE teams to build resilience and reliability into your environment thereby protecting it against chaos. Scenarios will be designed and executed to see what will actually happen if critical components (production servers, services, processes, connections or even your disaster recovery systems) break for any reason including high loads. Tests can be halted or rolled back safely and automatically.

Rather than building failsafe mechanisms around what they think will happen, your SRE teams can see what actually happens when something breaks, and then build precise failsafe mechanisms such as code-based fixes, scaling of compute or storage, restarting a service, etc. Auto-remediation using orchestration tools can also be built into SRE. and the final result is a hardened environment, optimizing costs, service delivery, transaction processing and customer satisfaction.

Technology Environment Audit

Today, over 60% of an organization’s business and revenues run on technology. Therefore, analyzing how the technology is used and how it performs provides deep insight into how the entire organization functions, its pain points, and its inefficiencies. Nathan Claire’s subject matter experts employ a combination of automated, objective and subject mechanisms to audit your entire technology landscape, providing you with periodic reports that reveal:

 

  • All the technologies that are running in your environment
  • Most common root causes of problems
  • Average mean time to repair problems (MTTR)
  • Problems with high business impact
  • Underutilized investments
  • Geolocations with your highest digital customer activity
  • Problematic technologies needing skills and capacity development
  • Consistent vendor SLA breaches
  • Overstaffed and understaffed business units
  • Etc

 

The audit findings empower IT leadership and senior management make decisions that drive costs down whilst improving overall operational efficiency.