How a micro-finance institution reduced their IT spend by 34.5% and provides better customer service with a custom private cloud?
On average, a typical bank runs more than 80 badly documented applications. This restricts organizational flexibility, but also creates thousands of points of failure. These disparate systems unable to keep up with exponential growth in volumes brought out in digitized banking, including leveraging the latest technological advances such as the Internet of Things, increasing vulnerabilities to being outpaced by competitive financial institutions. Below is how one micro-financial institution transformed their outdated infrastructure by embracing cloud computing to maintain their competitive edge while meeting the changing demands of their customers.
Problem
A micro-financial institution with 32 branches started feeling growing pains as their business expanded, but their home-grown systems couldn’t keep pace. The built in-house systems were originally designed for typical 9 to 5 branch banking and had been patched numerous times to meet changing technology and customer needs. This band-aid approach left them facing lots of issues with risk, complexity, and a lack of scalability. And with the cost to maintain this system eating up more than 75% of the bank’s IT budget, there was little leftover for value-enhancing expenditure. Knowing customers now expect a bank to be more of an infomediary, assisting with making better financial and commercial decisions, they knew they needed a real-time, integrated system that would support the demand.
Solution
The micro-financial institution leveraged Speridian’s broad range of systems integration and consulting experience across the finance industry to help design a solution to fit their needs. After working on a cloud assessment, they determined a private cloud solution comprised of Dell, VMWare and EMC technology with real-time backups was the right solution to handle their needs and support future growth. Bank branches connect in via MPLS or secure VPN, and information is handled with the highest level of security available with Fortinet and F5 LB Solutions. The custom application development and deployment teams combined forces, working together on a project plan for data migration and clean up from existing databases, avoiding duplication within the new system with special attention on account holders. Speridian conducted many hands-on training sessions at various phases of the migration to help branches leverage the new technology, including readiness training, software advanced training, specific module orientation, and advanced features training. When the bank branches cut over to the new digital and mobile banking system they did so confidently and comfortably.
Impact
By providing the right infrastructure to enable core banking services available anywhere for their customers, client satisfaction increased dramatically. By having access to a complete customer profile in real-time, bank branch staff can offer their customers relevant products at the right time, increasing the adoption of additional services. The new SaaS model provides infinite scalability with their core technology system, allowing them to actualize their rapid growth plans. The banking institution noticed a significant dip in their IT spend, totaling 44.3% of their budget down from the 78.8% required to maintain their legacy systems. With the reduced operations costs, the new system enabled straight-through processing and real-time capabilities, increasing employee efficiency while reducing human error and fraud.
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