Background
One of North America's leading financial institutions, this customer serves over 11 million individual and small business clients with more than 1,000 branches and 37,000 employees worldwide. The customer initiated a new project in order to come into compliance with Basel II, an international accord that requires global financial institutions to improve risk management operations.

Challenge
The $320M project was a virtual re-write of three of the customer's risk management systems. In order to meet the quickly approaching deadline for Basel II compliance and realize the competitive advantage of reducing its capital reserve allocation, the customer had to rapidly define and validate the application requirements before development. During the project definition phase, the customer's business analysts and SME's spent nine months compiling a staggering four-foot-high stack of use cases, text requirements and static screen shots. These requirements, which were wheeled into review meetings on a hand truck, were nearly impossible to manage, trace and validate.

Result
The customer engaged iRise consulting to perform a gap analysis on the existing set of requirements for the project. Using iRise simulation, a complete visual preview of the proposed application was created in just 4 weeks. The gap analysis uncovered a massive redundancy in the requirements for the system. By presenting the initial 600 Web-page simulation to more than 100 stakeholders throughout the bank, iRise and the customer were able to validate system requirements, ensure that all compliance-related issues were addressed and identify hundreds of potentially unnecessary pages. The final 182 Web page simulation was presented to the development team as a stable blueprint for an application that would satisfy regulatory mandates and meet delivery deadlines.

Simulation and visual validation of the project requirements uncovered more than 400 pages of unnecessary overlap. At an estimated development cost of $5,000 per page, the re-factored simulation provided a $2 million savings and a 30% reduction in the application development timeline.