Sukhjit Sandhu Email & Phone Number

Bristol, England, United Kingdom

Cirencester, England, United Kingdom

I worked to streamline the corporate data architecture by moving wealth management processes onto strategic platforms, which allowed St James Place to decommission outdated systems based on a fated Oracle data repository. To do this, I first identified and catalogued the processes, applications, data, and teams that would be affected by the migration. Then, I worked closely with the architect to choose the target systems and data repositories based upon SQL Server. All major decisions were approved by a technical governance authority.Subsequently, I produced end-to-end process design documents, including as-is and to-be process maps, which were further refined into detailed JIRA user stories in consultation with the product managers with supporting documentation on Confluence. Acceptance testing was planned and organised. Target systems have included Salesforce, Power BI/Tableau, and the Client & Adviser Online portals. Formal management of risks, assumptions issues, & dependencies were included, as were non-functional requirements. The main products I worked on were ISAs, onshore & offshore bonds, unit trusts, trustee investment accounts, retirement accounts, SIPPs and venture capital trusts/enterprise investment schemes.

Bristol, England, United Kingdom

I have worked as a Business Analyst to incept a series of workstreams to improve the collection of pension administration fees and the accuracy of the financial reporting of the debts owed to the company. I have written a series of papers and taken these to the governance board for approval. These have included a revised order of disposal policy, new process controls to prevent fees for plans fated to be Not Taken Up (NTU), and the introduction of payment plans for property SIPPs with rent arrears due to the pandemic.I have also worked on compliance risk assessments on the processes & systems for producing annual review packs & statutory money purchase illustrations (SMPI). This has included proposals to utilise the dispensation allowed in the regulations for simplified packs for money purchase pension pots with < £5,000, such as for insolvent SIPPs from failed investments awaiting compensation. In the course of my duties, I used Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio to seek business insights by writing SQL against a mirror copy of the operational data repository. The systems I worked with were SIPP Pro (Delta Financial Systems), Apex Workflow and Cashfac (Treasury Operations).

Bristol, England, United Kingdom

I worked as a Business Analyst for the finance division to extend the Oracle e-Business suite with a new Invoice capture and validation service provided by Bottomline Technologies. This introduced automated financial controls for accounts payable. Using JIRA tickets, six Oracle integration points were incrementally explored, designed, and built under an agile development approach. I also produced papers on configuration options to balance the conflicting business needs of maximising automation (straight through processing) and optimising financial controls using different validation rules and tolerances. I also shaped an implementation strategy allowing a backlog of invoices to be run off the old system.

Swindon, United Kingdom

THE PROJECTS(1) Payment Services Directive II (PSD2) - Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) I worked on a regulatory project to comply with this EU directive and improve the way Nationwide carried out the Identification, Verification and Authentication of customers. I have worked in the following:- (i) Regulatory Fraud Reporting, (ii) Financial Crime, (iii) eCommerce card payments through the visa scheme, and (iv) Multi-factor authentication.I conducted a compliance gap analysis across multiple payment channels, primarily on the Visa card scheme for point-of-sale, e-commerce, and intermediated channels such as PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay. The gap analysis extended to payments through the online bank, the banking app, and Nationwide cash points terminals. The payment methods examined were faster payments, CHAPS, PayM (now defunct), and BACS.(2) Customer Communications Management This programme developed new enterprise solutions for managing customer communications holistically across both digital & paper mediums, including dynamic document composition and automated customer correspondence to replace localised letter writing. This included an exercise to update data retention policies under data governance and to both archive and purge scanned documentation in accordance with these policies. (3) Contact Centre TransformationThis programme implemented a range of new technologies including natural language call steering, biometric voice analytics, webchat and knowledge base as well as improving exploitation of IVR authentication and process automationMY WORKIn all three programmes I have been the inception analyst, developing the benefit models, validating the business case and writing scope statements for individual workstreams. I have subsequently carried out the detailed analysis within individual workstreams, including process mapping, requirements elicitation and support for architectural design, testing and business readiness.

Bristol & Newport With Travel To Edinburgh, Birmingham & London

THE PROJECTS & MY WORK(1) Business BankingLloyds recognised the need to reduce the cost of small business banking by simplifying and automating processes. I worked on a project to execute this strategy by integrating bank letters and forms into a workflow system (PEGA). The automation benefits were realised through pre-population, bar-coding, scanning and auto-routing to the relevant workflow queue.(2) Divestment of TSBFor the divestment of TSB from the Lloyds Banking Group, I worked on a project to realign bank-accounts from TSB back to Lloyds prior to the formal split. I was responsible for the rectification of over-charging and interest errors through use of parallel calculation models which I built in XL. (3) Integration of Bank of Scotland (BoS)I worked within the complex customer migrations programme during the integration of Bank of Scotland (BoS) to the Lloyds Banking Group, I elicited the business requirements and defined the target operating model for the migration of BoS Commercial Finance accounts used for invoice discounting & BoS corporate accounts used for securitisation.Gaps were identified in the target models so I initiated IT projects to allow the target systems to handle the very large balances & transactions and apply interest rates with an increased tolerance of 5 decimal places. (4) Integration of Halifax & Bank of ScotlandI worked on the business readiness preparations for the integration of the general insurance divisions of the two banks. This included processes , procedures, training, communications and user access management

Birmingham, With Travel To Dublin

THE PROJECTPheonix Life had developed a business model whereby closed books of business were administered by a panel of business process outsourcers whilst the key control functions of accounting and actuarial were carried out at head-office. The Irish subsidiary of Pheonix Life was to be aligned to this model. MY WORKI worked up the detailed transformation plans including: - outsourcing of administration to Percana, the integration of the Finance functions into head-office, and the systems migration to an Oracle General Ledger and SAS Reporting system.I produced a transition roadmap which laid out the sub-projects needed to take the business from the as-is operating model to the target end state. This road-map was used to initiate new IT & businesses projects as well as refine the scope of projects already in-flight.

Swindon, With Travel To St. Albans

THE PROJECTNationwide Building Society distributed personal loans from a wholly owned subsidiary; Nationwide Trust, whilst competitors considered personal loans to be a core banking product equal to current accounts, savings and mortgages. As such Nationwide Trust was to be subsumed into the main Building Society. MY WORKI produced both an as-is and a target operating model for the Finance operations, mapping all finance activities into the Finance or Admin departments of Head-Office. I subsequently produced an approach & plan for the integration then managed the recruitment, training, transfer of work and eventual closure of the finance arm of the subsidiary.

Swindon, United Kingdom

THE PROJECTIn order to reduce costs, any administration processes (or elements thereof) which were neither customer-facing or knowledge-based, were to be off-shored through a new image and workflow system (Singularity), thereby creating a split offshore - onshore operating model. MY WORKI cataloged and then process re-engineered the admin. processes for the whole of life, term life assurance and endowment products. I built a XL model to record the unit time split between onshore & offshore activities to track benefits.

Newport With Travel To Leeds & Bournemouth

THE PROJECTMarketing segmented their customer base and sought behavioral insights. Two potentially lucrative segments were identified where new propositions were needed: - (1) Young & educated customers often using comparison engines to establish value before contacting insurers directly, (2) Affluent, middle-age customers from the home counties who sought a formal relationship with knowledgeable agents of a well respected brand.MY WORK I worked on the test launch of the two new home insurance propositions utilising two Third Party Administrators (TPAs); Capita Insurance Services and BDML Connect. I established the business requirements including the definition of the bordereau, banking arrangements, and new web-site requirements including prototype wireframes.

Cardiff With Travel To Leeds

THE PROJECTFollowing sustained advertising from insolvency practitioners, a substantial increase in people seeking debt protection through individual voluntary arrangements had occurred for those with unsecured borrowings. Evershed's insolvency units had subsequently received an overwhelming increase in referrals from credit card companies and was unable to cope adequately with the new volumes.MY WORKI carried out an operational review of the whole unit through a series of workshops in which all the management and senior staff disclosed the current problems and set-out measures to provide immediate operational relief. This involved reorganising people, work and upscaling the operation through recruitment of temps.

Bristol With Travel To Aylesbury

THE PROJECTOperating efficiencies of scale can be achieved through having large teams which can process any type of business process. Historically, this had not been achievable because of the variety of systems and complexity of processes, which in turn led to the need for many sub-scale specialist teams. A solution came from the "Microsoft Inductive User Interface Design Methodology", whereby a step-by-step simple front-end was constructed allowing any general administrators to carryout high volume processes with complexity hidden behind a front-end.MY WORK I was the lead analyst for the design of the process-orientated common front-end for a new range of simplified Life bonds and 'A' day Group Pensions. Use-cases were the prime method to elicit the requirements using the Rational toolset, whilst wireframes were used to prototype the front-end.

Redditch, Worcestershire

THE PROJECTAqera iPensions was a financial services arm of a technology spinoff from AT&T where a modern software programming tool was researched and developed allowing very large amounts of complex code to be developed quickly and efficiently. Meanwhile the most complex systems in Life offices tended to be quotation systems which were under constant strain from regulatory changes. As such Aqera iPensions developed an industry wide actuarial calculation engine to replace bespoke quotation capabilities. MY WORKI carried out the detailed analysis and worked with the actuaries on the design of the new calculations engine. My focus was on ensuring compliance with FSA COB, IR 76, IR 12 & SMPI.Following the first major sale, I helped configure & test the engine to the B&CE product range

London, United Kingdom

THE PROJECT National Australia Bank (NAB) commissioned CGI to provide their UK bancassurance advisory staff with laptop based point of sale (POS) systems across all their UK banks: - Allied Irish, Clydesdale, Yorkshire & Northern. MY WORK(1) I carried out the standard configuration of the POS to NAB's funds and product lines (ISAs, OEICs, PEPs, life assurance, critical illness, pension), in particular illustrations & documents.(2) I carried out the analysis to enhance the POS to: - - evaluate the customers appetite to risk and generate a default portfolio to match the risk.- display an elegant temporal graph to model & plan a customers finances through their lifetime.

Cardiff With Travel To Peterborough & London

THE PROJECTThe newly regulated stakeholder pensions with their 1% charge cap forced providers to operate more efficiently through eCommerce whereby customers could self-service their plans & schemes and prospects could generate personalised quotations over the internet.MY WORKI specified the seamless integration of the new multi-branded websites with the back-office systems and supported the creative agencies in their usability designs and the test teams in their functional & acceptance testing.

Cardiff With Travel To Royal Tunbridge Wells

THE PROJECTPersonal pensions were introduced by the government in 1988 and NPI established a successful niche in this market but had inadequate systems to cope with the more complex group money purchase personal pensions. A new system was sought to enable NPI to extend naturally into the employer market. MY WORKI elicited the requirements for a new group pensions administration capability and produced use-case & data models using the UML method and the Rational Rose case tool. Through gap analysis these were used to evaluate various options, which led to the selection of the ALIS package (now marketed by Sapiens). NPI was the launch customer for the software package.I formulated a migration strategy based on a statistical analysis of all NPI group schemes using Access populated from multiple mainframe systems. Schemes were prioritised by customer potential so the complete portfolios of the top IFAs & Employee Benefit Consultants were migrated first, as opposed to the alternative approach to target high-cost legacy systems. I then developed the approach to migrating historic data, cleansing the data and converting 'troublesome' schemes to one of the new products rather then migrating them to the new platform. I also provided investigative support to the data mapping team.

Cheltenham With Travel To Paris

THE PROJECTPrior to the takeover by Zurich, Eagle Star International had ambitions to expand internationally. The unique selling point to enable this was to have the efficiency of a common policy administration system which could be used across multiple countries and product variants. IBM provisioned the Insurance Application Architecture (IAA) as a reference design framework to be used to develop such a system.MY WORKI worked on specifying the actuarial algorithms (calculation modules) for the following French assurance products:- (1) Pure risk disability and term assurance where rates are looked up from tables. (2) Whole of Life (with-profits) where rates were calculated from actuarial equations. I designed the algorithms to interact to the product independent engine, through use of IBM's IAA design principles.

Bristol, United Kingdom

THE PROJECTPricing underwriting risk is arguably the core competency of a successful insurance company, to achieve this Sun Alliance invested considerably in Management Information capabilities with a comprehensive IBM - DB2 Database of policies and claims coupled with state of the art Data Warehouse on a Tandem massive parallel processing super-computing machine. This capability needed to be maintained and continuously enhanced. MY WORK(1) I carried out a design review of the database & interfaces which fed the Data Warehouse and subsequently refined the organisation of the database and the structure of the input data. (2) I added ‘Global Corporate’ insurance business to the Warehouse through a new interface which I specified and tested. (3) I produced a detailed proposal to integrate the Sun Alliance data warehouse with the Royal insurance MIS system as part of the two companies merger.

Bristol, United Kingdom

THE PROJECTFollowing a sequence of direct salesforce suspensions from regulatory inspections, pre-emptive action was taken and a board-room paper was prepared on converting Sun Life’s direct sales force from a self-employed commission only status to salaried employees and thus eliminating the incentive to maximise commission ahead of providing suitable advice.MY WORK I wrote part of the board-room paper on the IT costs and implications of conversion, this consisted of identifying the impacts and estimating.

Borough High Street, London

THE PROJECTSun Life had undergone a substantial rise in the number of funds under management through a number of different investment vehicles, each with different tax & accounting rules. The investment administration & accounting function was under strain and the basic in-house systems in need of major upgrade. As the function was consistent across multiple financial businesses in the UK, the area was a perfect candidate for an out-of-the-box software package. MY WORKI was the business analyst in a team which: - (1) Defined a set of business requirements. (2) Configured and tested the Investment Accounting & Administration package (3) Developed a utility to dynamically transfer data from the old Investment systems. (4) Planned the implementation (5) Developed interfaces from a front-office trading system and an Exshare information feed(6) Developed interfaces to a separate CGT calculation package & the life office general ledger

Bristol, United Kingdom

THE PROJECTWith increasing regulatory pressure on independent financial advisers, Sun Life offered brokers the option to tie and only distribute Sun Life products in exchange for bearing many of the regulatory overheads. A new channel was created "Sun Life Financial Associates" and this was supported & monitored.MY WORKI was the analyst in the development of an Executive Information System to monitor the sales performance and quality of business written by those brokers who chose to tie. This included persistency rates and actuarial calculations of present value of future profits all presented graphically with league tables, pie charts and exception reporting.

Bristol, United Kingdom

THE PROJECTNew business reporting is an essential element of any Life office, at the time this was produced by manually aggregating reports from individual product systems. As well as being laborious and error prone, there was no ability for executives to interrogate the figures or view them differently allowing them to understand trends or their reasons. MY WORKI was the analyst in the development of a new management information system (MIS) on a relational database; IBM's DB2 which captured raw ‘new business’ information from a diverse set of systems and re-produced the formal life office ‘new business’ reporting with the addition of drill-down & ad-hoc reporting.

Bristol, United Kingdom

THE PROJECTAs with most companies at the time, Sun Life had product systems which managed various life, pensions and investment policies but there was no common customer records or a view of a customers overall holdings. Marketing demanded this customer view in order to optimise their cross-selling and up-selling opportunities and ensure Broker's customers were not accidentally marketed. MY WORK(1) I wrote a statement of business requirements for a new client Marketing database, which was to eventually hold information on all of Sun Life’s one million customers.(2) I completed a stage of building Sun Life’s customer database, by designing & implementing an interface from the unit-linked pensions system which added information on 250,000 customers.

Bristol, United Kingdom

THE PROJECTThe Securities and Investments Board (SIB) under the Financial Services Services Act prescribed that any broker introducing new business to Sun Life must be registered as fit & proper, in addition all incentives & commissions must not have a product bias.MY WORKI was the analyst in the development of: - (1) a directory of all SIB registered brokers utilised as a marketing repository for Sun Life inspectors (2) a bespoke system to calculate & pay incentives for Sun Life inspectors. Both developments passed through all the stages of the systems development lifecycle.

Bristol, United Kingdom

THE PROJECTSun Life developed & launched the new "Over 50" life assurance plan which was initially marketed via direct mail and subsequently through intensive daytime television advertising. This product targeted a niche in the marketplace for life assurance to cover funeral costs for older customers without the need for intrusive underwriting. This has proved to be exceptionally profitable and is still sold today.MY WORKI system tested a ‘Conventional Life’ Direct Mail Application Handling system, which included semi-automated fast path underwriting and distribution of a free clock-radio.

Nantwich, Cheshire

I completed a graduate training programme to become a junior systems analyst. The training consisted of external BCS courses and an internal training project for the HR department.

Bachelor Of Science With Honours, Physics

Nine Ordinary & Three Advanced Level General Certificates Of Education