GMA’s consulting practice works primarily with financial services organisations to help them run their operations more effectively and efficiently through the implementation of collaborative-working functionality utilising the SharePoint platform.

GMA's team has extensive experience of implementing SharePoint for clients in a range of sectors from retail banking and capital markets to asset management, including working with a number of hedge funds.

We provide services for all stages of the project lifecycle from the strategic vision through to delivery. We combine technical expertise with sector-specific experience to ensure that our projects meet quality, time and budget expectations.

As well as implementing the full range of standard SharePoint capabilities and features, we use a range of tools to design and build industry-specific bespoke functionality. Based on our experience we have developed a clear vision and understanding of how this versatile platform can provide significant benefits for our clients.            

However, where financial services organisations do have existing BI systems they tend to be very expensive, difficult to use and therefore are not widely available to staff. SharePoint's BI capabilities allow data from a wide range of sources to be provided to users across the organisation in user-friendly formats and at a significantly lower overall cost to the business than other BI solutions.

GMA can utilise a range of tools to deliver effective and easy-to-use BI capabilities providing users with the information they need in the format they want. These include:

• PerformancePoint Services
• Dundas Data Visualization
• ProClarity
• Excel Services
• SQL Server Reporting Services
• SQL Server Integration Services

The opportunity now exists to empower staff across the organisation to create and share up-to-date and accurate information, identify and resolve problems, or drive the business forward by spotting and taking advantage of opportunities as they arise.

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A full range of flexible and scalable portals, with integrated content management, which can be styled using SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio:

• Intranets
• Extranets
• Websites
• Composites

Composites are custom portals built on the SharePoint platform which enable data from underlying line-of-business systems to be retrieved and displayed in real time.

Enterprise applications such as CRM, ERP, accounting, trading, and settlement systems operate in silos, so users have to access each one separately to view the data they need.

GMA has the skills and experience to build, for example, a Composite to extract and display customer data from a client's LOB applications. This information could include:

• Contact details
• Account details
• Products owned
• Credit / trading limits
• Recent transactions
• Outstanding payments

The SharePoint Composite would allow users to view and interact with all of the customer data in one place, providing a 'single version of the truth'. With the enhanced capabilities of Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint 2010, users can even write back to the underlying data source.

Implementing Composites will enable organisations to enhance efficiency and identify additional revenue-generating opportunities.

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Implementation of secure, self-service collaborative workspaces that keep people connected and informed:

• Team sites
• Project sites
• Blogs
• Wikis

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Implementation of SharePoint search engine capabilities to increase productivity and reduce information overload by providing employees with the ability to find relevant content in a wide range of repositories and formats:

• Search file shares, Web sites, SharePoint sites and Exchange Public Folders
• Index, search, and intelligently display information from line-of-business applications, relational databases, and other structured content using the Business Data Catalog
• Robust security, granular administrative controls, comprehensive monitoring, analytics, and reporting
• Enhanced compliance and litigation discovery
• Leverage people search capabilities to find people not only by department or job title but also by expertise, social distance, and common interests

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Implementation of the full range of SharePoint information management capabilities:

• Document management with 'out of the box' and custom creation and approval workflows
• Records management with retention, protection, and auditing policies
• Centralised document repositories with consistent categorisation and metadata
• Integrated rights management

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