Requirements management in the financial industry is crucial to reducing risks, identifying optimal processes, ensuring business compliance, and pursuing high-quality products for customers.
Record management statistics show that document challenges cost organisations over £15,000 per employee per year. Fortunately, documenting requirements is a major part of a management plan.
Additionally, top trends in banking and financial services show that FinTech, digital transformation, AI, and robotics are leading the innovative sectors. However, your product requirements need management.
Let’s show you what a successful management plan can do for your financial or banking software before sharing how to plan and manage requirements effectively.
The Importance of Requirements Management in Financial Sectors
The importance of requirements management in the development process for finance is undeniable. Here are some ways requirements management matters in financial software:
- Gain an enhanced understanding of stakeholder requirements, needs, and expectations
- Know what problems or pain points your financial software needs to address
- Your entire project team will be on the same page about goals and objectives
- Perform impact analysis to mitigate risk related to scope creep and change management
- Minimise high-cost rework on the requirements development process for financial software
- Use test cases to ensure the financial software meets the acceptance criteria
- Resolve issues early with a requirements management plan for a financial business
- Experience real-time collaboration to manage change related to stakeholder needs
- Implement mission-critical enterprise resource planning and payroll processing
- Protect sensitive customer data critical to retaining customers as a financial service
- Practice due diligence by being compliant and following regulatory standards for financial software
The Future of Banking and Requirements Management Tools
Managing requirements is crucial for banking, financial, and insurance companies. Companies can deliver efficient solutions, mitigate risks, and manage change effectively with the right tools and software. However, what does the future of the UK’s financial and banking look like?
Software development statistics show that enterprises drive 84.7% of development projects. Don’t be left in competitive darkness by failing to move legacy systems to a modern solution. Moreover, the City UK suggests the local financial sector was worth £275 billion in 2022.
What Are Requirements Management Tools and Software?
Requirements management software may provide the answer to your future needs to modernise your financial enterprise and benefit from managing requirements efficiently. A single-source requirements management software tool helps your financial organization stay competitive and manage change.
Requirements Management Tools for UK Financial Institutions
Meet Requiment, the requirements management tool for projects of all sizes in all enterprises. Our single-source solution provides every answer you need to stay competitive with changing requirements for complex projects originating from a financial organization.
Learn about Requiment to see how our requirements management tools can help you manage the scope of any project in effective project management. Managing requirements has never been as simple as using the top requirements management software in the UK.
Benefits of Requirements Management Tools
Some benefits of using Requiment include:
- Pricing plans to suit every enterprise, organization, or business
- A guided process to help anyone manage all requirements, even without experience
- Paperless output reports to keep your business among sustainable competitors
- Task generation tools to help a team progress toward the end of a project scope
- The ability to create wireframes for mobile application development in financial or banking services
- Demo videos to guide you through any requirements management process
Sign up for a free trial today to experience effective requirements management, or book a demo to let our team show you how efficient your financial requirements management can be with our software.
Who Is Responsible for Requirements Management in Financial Institutions?
A project or product manager is typically responsible for a requirements management system or project management regarding financial companies. However, a business analyst may perform impact analysis, business analysis, and requirements analysis. Still, anyone can perform these duties when you sign up to use Requiment because the guided process will guide project management teams on site.
Requirements Management Best Practices in the Financial Industry
The financial industry must follow strict regulations for compliance, and some best practices let top software development companies in the UK assist institutions like yours outshine others in the industry. Here are some best practices to follow in a financial requirements management plan:
- Use flexible methodologies, such as Agile, SAFe, or hybrid project management methodologies
- Understand multiple stakeholder needs and company requirements thoroughly
- Gather all possible requirements through workshops, focus groups, and document analysis
- Prioritise the approval process for credit cards, PCI DSS, security standards, and PCI compliance
- Establish traceability with a requirements traceability matrix (RTM) to remain compliant
- Establish a risk management strategy with a risk analysis
Risks related to financial services include regulatory risks, credit risks, market risks, and operational risks. A risk management strategy is integral to a requirements management plan.
Financial Services Compliance in the UK
Financial services compliance in the UK involves using accounting software to produce statutory accounts, automated tagging or submissions, and producing compliant financial statements. Financial compliance in the UK covers taxation, anti-money laundering, and correct financial reporting. Your requirements management system must ensure all future software meets local regulations.
Different Types of Requirements in Requirements Management
Stakeholder and business requirements aren’t the only two types for effective software development and requirements management within your business. Instead, here’s a breakdown of the typical requirements to manage in financial businesses and for future software development:
Business requirements – Elicit company requirements to establish traceability, mitigate risk, and effectively adapt to change management as business needs and goals evolve in the modern era.
Stakeholder requirements – Elicit stakeholder requirements to understand stakeholder needs and manage the project team to ensure stakeholders and developers are on the same page.
System requirements – Gather system requirements to know what security, features, tools, and functions a financial software system needs to prevent scope creep and result in success.
Other requirements – Other requirements may include accounting system requirements, payroll requirements, security requirements, ERP requirements, and CRM requirements.
Requirements Management Process in Financial Services Guide
The requirements management process results in an effective requirements management plan, which guarantees a successful financial software development process for banking and other software.
Many requirements management tools can help your team or outsourced developers from Pulsion effectively manage all requirements. Still, let’s discover the processes involved.
The Planning Stage
Management tools often require a team to choose the most efficient methodology for software development in the planning stage, including Agile, Waterfall, or Scrum. Project managers add the methodology to the management plan document to ensure everyone follows the project scope. The importance of requirements management in Agile development can guide you in the Agile method.
Eliciting Needs and Requirements
Next, project managers elicit stakeholder and business requirements and provide the key information for system requirements. The managers identify internal business stakeholders and users to gather requirements related to stakeholder needs. Stakeholders are anyone with a stake in the software, and managers often use the top eliciting requirements techniques.
Defining Needs and Requirements
Next, project managers will define needs and requirements related to financial software. Defining requirements will require managers to follow the key characteristics of good software requirements, particularly related to finance and banking. Knowing how to define your project requirements is more important in financial software than most because of the sensitive data. Each requirement must be:
- Accurate – Thoroughly detailing customer needs
- Feasible – Well-researched and attainable
- Necessary – Essential to business objectives
- Specific – Must be traceable
- Testable – Must be able to use test cases
- Unambiguous – Clear enough to understand thoroughly
The Requirement Analysis Stage
The requirements analysis stage ensures the system requirements meet the stakeholder expectations and business goals. Project managers typically use an impact or gap analysis, Gantt charts, role-activity diagrams (RAD), or business process modeling notation (BPMN) techniques to conduct the requirements analysis process for financial software development.
Establish Traceability
Requirements traceability is integral to ensure your financial business follows regulatory requirements for compliance. Also, it helps to mitigate risk, track change, and prevent scope creep. Also, data risks and cyber threats could have a significant impact on multiple stakeholders. Project managers establish traceability with a requirements traceability matrix to track and monitor changing requirements.
Requirements Documents
Requirements documents outline a project’s requirements management plan, process, and traceability. Product managers often know how to write a software requirements document (SRD). However, Requiment lets you access and document requirements with a paperless system to remain sustainable. Resolve problems by having your key information on a document before managing requirements.
The Review Process
Review processes offer real-time collaboration between your banking or finance team and the development teams to overcome common challenges before financial software development. Effective collaboration is a best practice throughout the software development life cycle (SDLC). The review process is mission-critical to determine whether stakeholder requirements have been met.
The Validation Stage
The validation process involves having met the success criteria set out in the first stages of this process. The validation stage may also occur after the development of your financial or banking software and include vigorous system and security testing. Often, stakeholders will be involved in testing and validating the financial or banking software system for effective requirements management.
How to Successfully Manage Requirements in Complex Industries
Successfully managing requirements will help project management adapt when requirements change and track requirements for stakeholders to ensure product development occurs without a hitch. However, the financial or banking industry often have requirements change due to security risks.
Firstly, make sure project requirements traceability is set in stone, and the product development project follows a bullet-proof management plan. Too much risk exists in financial and banking software systems. Security, validation, and analysis stages are crucial to your management plan.
Also, familiarise your business with the regulation standards to ensure compliance, and discuss the processes developers will use to meet compliance standards. High-quality products originate from real-time collaboration, and we recommend using management tools to collaborate in product development.
Requirements change fast in the banking, insurance, and financial sectors. Prepare yourself with the right requirements management plan, and identify issues early to resolve issues before they threaten your software. Sign up to use our management tools to automate the management plan.
Summing Up Requirements Management for Financial Services
Efficient requirements management tools and strategies ensure industry compliance, traceability, risk management, successful product development, and efficiency in high-quality projects. Meanwhile, these tools can provide a platform for effective communication from a single-source solution.
Your management team will get approval much easier with an effective management plan. Master a requirements management plan in banking and financial software today. Sign up to try our requirements management tools today, or book a demo to see the tools in action.
Requirements Management in Financial Institutions FAQs
What Are Common Challenges in Requirements Management?
The most common challenges in requirements management for financial or banking software development include:
- A failure to identify critical threats to financial clients
- A lack of team communication in product development
- Changed requirements tax with ineffective requirements documents
- Decision rehashing about stakeholder requirements
- Last-minute feedback from stakeholders and product owners
- Mismatched expectations between stakeholders and managers
- The failure to identify other requirements for product development
What Is a Requirements Management Plan?
A management plan outlines and documents how an entire software team will approach your financial or banking app development. It also includes an approval process and change management strategies in the requirements management process to meet stakeholder needs with the intended software.
How Can You Track Changing Requirements?
A requirements traceability matrix (RTM) helps project management manage and track requirements. You can book a demo with our Requiment team to see how our software can help you track and manage requirements throughout the management plan because traceability plays a major role in our approach.
How Many Requirements Management Tools Do You Need?
Fortunately, our management tools on Requiment let you do everything, including requirements elicitation, analysis, management, and documentation. The benefits of using Requiment are that you don’t need another system or experience to use the many tools available. Sign up today to learn more.