Application Development for One of the Largest Banks in the World

Cloud-based solutions dominate the digital world with the cloud now hosting over 94% of workload and computing processes in 2021 according to the research by Cisco. Businesses across every sector have embraced one or more forms of the cloud computing stack (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, BPO) to garner its many advantages. These range from scalability, enhanced productivity, fast deployment, API access, and mobility to increased security and lower Capex.

At Techolution, we have helped many companies from different sectors such as healthcare, retail, manufacturing and banking to modernize and develop their applications to the cloud. A recent case study showcasing a successful project for one of the largest banks in the world shows how Techolution partnered with them to become the top digital customer experience bank in the US.

Overview

As one of the largest in the US and seventh largest in the world, this bank needed to constantly improve its customer experience via development of internal and customer-facing applications. The crux of the challenge was how to stay competitive with agile Fintech startups by speeding, time to market for application development, which would require the bank to:

• Modernize their legacy-based applications
• Reduce the impact of technical debt with legacy mainframe infrastructure
• Ensure integration across a modern cloud architecture for CI/CD

The overall goal of this was to speed up the application development release cycles to enhance mobile customer user experience and increase operational agility. This would be necessary to retain their position as a banking market leader capable of competing with agile Fintech startups.

Challenges

The primary challenge to reaching this goal was having over 30,000 developers managing thousands of tightly coupled applications that resulted in a slow and cumbersome release cycle schedule. This was primarily due to complex application dependencies and data flow challenges between legacy mainframe infrastructure and the network edge. Quarterly release schedules were not enough to bring order to highly coupled applications across thousands of developers. This left the bank facing bottleneck challenges with application updates, complex dependency matrixes, and weekend-based releases.

Solutions

While this bank had implemented a robust framework meant to decouple applications for faster and more frequent applications update cycles, it was not delivering the desired results. The Techolution team reviewed the current architecture and then helped create a spring-based application framework. This ensures that application teams can work autonomously across the SDLC by decoupling applications for independent release cycles.

We worked closely with the bank to deploy a modern, cloud-native digital banking platform that significantly improved the user experience for mobile banking customers. This included implementing full automation and compliance within a modified CI/CD pipeline.

Results

Techolution was able to deliver a modified development framework that:

• Decoupled applications to enable autonomous application development teams to drive
  independent release cycles that increased commits while reducing integration testing times
• Shrank dev cycle from previous quarterly release cycle update windows to a far more flexible and timely schedule of every other week
• Reduced prospective cloud-targeted applications for migration by 80 percent to only those providing the biggest business benefits, which reduced the migration schedule from months to weeks along with the associated massive migration costs
• Shifted data to the edge to reduce legacy system dependencies, speed data retrieval time by placing it closer to the requestor through built-in data replication.

This bank is now rated as the top digital customer experience bank in the US. In addition to this UI enhancement, this bank is also experiencing faster time to market and has secured new IT cost efficiencies as a result of modernizing their entire mobile banking infrastructure.

To see how Techolution is helping different sector leaders migrate to the cloud and modernize in place, request our complete portfolio of application development projects below.

Cloud-based solutions dominate the digital world with the cloud now hosting over 94% of workload and computing processes in 2021 according to the research by Cisco. Businesses across every sector have embraced one or more forms of the cloud computing stack (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, BPO) to garner its many advantages. These range from scalability, enhanced productivity, fast deployment, API access, and mobility to increased security and lower Capex.

At Techolution, we have helped many companies from different sectors such as healthcare, retail, manufacturing and banking to modernize and develop their applications to the cloud. A recent case study showcasing a successful project for one of the largest banks in the world shows how Techolution partnered with them to become the top digital customer experience bank in the US.

Overview

As one of the largest in the US and seventh largest in the world, this bank needed to constantly improve its customer experience via development of internal and customer-facing applications. The crux of the challenge was how to stay competitive with agile Fintech startups by speeding, time to market for application development, which would require the bank to:

• Modernize their legacy-based applications
• Reduce the impact of technical debt with legacy mainframe infrastructure
• Ensure integration across a modern cloud architecture for CI/CD

The overall goal of this was to speed up the application development release cycles to enhance mobile customer user experience and increase operational agility. This would be necessary to retain their position as a banking market leader capable of competing with agile Fintech startups.

Challenges

The primary challenge to reaching this goal was having over 30,000 developers managing thousands of tightly coupled applications that resulted in a slow and cumbersome release cycle schedule. This was primarily due to complex application dependencies and data flow challenges between legacy mainframe infrastructure and the network edge. Quarterly release schedules were not enough to bring order to highly coupled applications across thousands of developers. This left the bank facing bottleneck challenges with application updates, complex dependency matrixes, and weekend-based releases.

Solutions

While this bank had implemented a robust framework meant to decouple applications for faster and more frequent applications update cycles, it was not delivering the desired results. The Techolution team reviewed the current architecture and then helped create a spring-based application framework. This ensures that application teams can work autonomously across the SDLC by decoupling applications for independent release cycles.

We worked closely with the bank to deploy a modern, cloud-native digital banking platform that significantly improved the user experience for mobile banking customers. This included implementing full automation and compliance within a modified CI/CD pipeline.

Results

Techolution was able to deliver a modified development framework that:

• Decoupled applications to enable autonomous application development teams to drive
  independent release cycles that increased commits while reducing integration testing times
• Shrank dev cycle from previous quarterly release cycle update windows to a far more flexible and timely schedule of every other week
• Reduced prospective cloud-targeted applications for migration by 80 percent to only those providing the biggest business benefits, which reduced the migration schedule from months to weeks along with the associated massive migration costs
• Shifted data to the edge to reduce legacy system dependencies, speed data retrieval time by placing it closer to the requestor through built-in data replication.

This bank is now rated as the top digital customer experience bank in the US. In addition to this UI enhancement, this bank is also experiencing faster time to market and has secured new IT cost efficiencies as a result of modernizing their entire mobile banking infrastructure.

To see how Techolution is helping different sector leaders migrate to the cloud and modernize in place, request our complete portfolio of application development projects below.