Credit Suisse Learns From Past Outsourcing Deals to Fine-Tune Agreement With BT and Swisscom

Past outsourcing activities provided us with a keen understanding of the complex technological, financial and people issues that are intrinsic to an outsourcing initiative. This time, we refined the sourcing process to compress the timescales, which not only enabled us to generate savings faster but also created a more-competitive and aggressive bidding environment, right up to contract signature. We also learned from previous experience that a deal is not concluded with contract signature -- a well-managed post-signature process is essential to ongoing success.

This was different from past initiatives because our decision-making was executed within the context of the integrated Credit Suisse, which put responsibility for the entire bank's telecommunications infrastructure in one place. In addition, under the leadership of our CIO, Tom Sanzone, we had direct access to the bank's Executive Board, of which he is a member. Because of the deal's scope, we put together a team of members from a broad spectrum of disciplines, including HR, finance, legal and compliance, IT risk, supply management, and other IT groups. We developed a stakeholder engagement process that ensured that we addressed concerns early and had full acceptance from all businesses.

We believed it was important to structure a deal that would drive innovation. This includes mechanisms that give significant upside to the providers if they over-perform on generating additional profit for the bank, primarily through savings. In addition, a unique feature is a multimillion-pound innovation fund that we created with BT and Swisscom to finance development of new technologies for Credit Suisse. The fund provides incentives to create innovative new solutions designed to enhance the bank's delivery of its offerings to clients. --James Walker