Alfa: Powering Auto Finance (CIOReview)

CIOReview's Automotive Technology Special, in which Alfa was named as one of the most promising automotive technology solution providers, also featured an interview with Alfa CEO Andrew Denton.

Automotive finance companies, with significant investments in monolithic mainframe systems, are struggling to respond to growing customer demand for enhanced digital experiences. A dearth of effective tools in overhauling business process systems further impedes the ability to align their systems with rapidly evolving marketplace and regulatory mandates. With more than 27 years of experience in enabling business transformation, Alfa presents its business process management system, Alfa Systems, which is a one-stop shop for all the IT needs of the auto finance companies. Alfa Systems allows companies to replace their existing legacy systems to achieve operational agility, lower opex, and meet regulatory requirements while being able to respond to market developments quickly.

Built on service-oriented architecture (SOA), in Java, using agile development methodologies, Alfa Systems provides auto finance companies advanced workflow systems that enable high levels of business process automation and implement the change initiatives to update the processes. The platform also allows business processes to be easily configured within the application to track user activity, communication, and customer interaction. Migration from legacy IT to new responsive systems thus becomes easy with Alfa.

Alfa Systems’ multithreading technology executes multiple inexpensive nodes, running on commodity hardware, which deliver the performance of the monolithic hardware, but at reduced cost. The comprehensive functionality encompassing digitalization, customer services, and better analytics built into the platform allows customers to remain competitive in the market. The platform also comes with a unique accounting engine and asset management for better control over the processes. The striking feature of Alfa Systems is its configurability, where the product can be engineered to generate product templates and customized workflow.

Furthermore, the advanced databases and modern architecture allows Alfa Systems to process large data volumes to derive valuable business insights.

With such capabilities, Alfa allows companies to deploy user-configurable business rules into all aspects of compliance, workflow, and transactions.

As an enterprise system for the auto finance industry, Alfa has several top companies as clients who have successfully replaced their business systems to drive the overall outcomes. One of its customers having a vehicle fleet in the millions utilizes Alfa Systems to implement process automation to improve the workflow and decision making. “Automated workflow and decision making is not an adjunct, but the heart of Alfa,” informs Denton. In another instance, a large vehicle manufacturer with multiple legacy systems wanted to consolidate all their IT systems into one. Delivering digital services while reducing the workforce was part of the strategy. The challenge, however, was to manage the entire fleet—comprising of commercial vehicles, trucks and passenger cars—in a cost-effective manner. Through Alfa Systems, the client leveraged commodity technology to achieve workflow automation and implement new digital services within months. The client also achieved the ability to view the entire customer base in a single pane of glass.

With several major customers from the U.S., Alfa focuses on providing its customer base with the tools to build new, digitally native products. With innovations around connected vehicle and Blockchain gathering pace, Alfa’s ability to work in core SOA will go a long way in enabling companies to capitalize on the market trends. “We aim to be the platform of choice for every asset finance company in the world,” concludes Denton.

This article was published by CIOReview in October 2017. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.