Bendigo and Adelaide Bank has overhauled its digital banking system to run on Google Cloud, resulting in greater tailored customer experience and faster rollout of new features.
The work was finalised in May this year, with the bank noting an uplift in performance including faster deployment times of 15 minutes and 99.9 percent availability across its underlying cloud infrastructure.
The bank used the Google Kubernetes Engine to scale back digital workloads in off-peak times, leading to reduced costs and a better ability to meet customer demands.
Andrew Cresp, chief information officer at Bendigo and Adelaide Bank told iTnews that the shift will see the bank gain greater “scalability, resilience, and nimbleness.”
“Until when we moved, we had a fixed capacity on-premises in our data centres for our online and mobile application,” Cresp said.
One motivator for the shift to cloud was an acknowledgment “that our customer needs are always changing” so “we need to ensure that our technology and services we provide to our customers can be as quick as possible and reliant”.
The move saw the bank shift its consumer digital app and web platform onto the Google Cloud which forms part of its core banking system consolidation work.
“Like every other organisation, we’ve undergone a bit of a transformation program over the last three or four years,” he said.
“The focus has been really on simplifying our organisation first and at the same time modernising it, so consolidating our core banking systems, and then what I would call the associated ecosystems around that.
“We’re moving origination processes to the cloud, so that we can move a lot faster for our customers and our partners.
“We’re also moving from 13 down to seven brands. So far, we’ve gone from eight core banking systems to four, we’ll knock off another two of them next year,” Cresp said.
He said “fundamentally” the bank has moved “what I call the ‘workloads that matter’ to the cloud”.
“I’ve learned from previous experiences it’s dangerous just to chase metrics on workloads in the cloud because you can easily move certain types of workloads like the phone directory, really quickly.
“But the value add comes when you move important workloads like payments and lending.”
Cresp said when it came to deciding the bank’s cloud strategy, “We agreed in a 45-minute meeting with our chief architect and someone else, to say Google Cloud for the engagement layer and for the data lake and AWS for the systems of record”.
As the shift to the cloud forms part of its whole of bank transformation around simplification, Cresp said there were around “650 applications that were in various places, mainly on-premises” that were shifted under the migration.
These were re-architected and then API-enabled, “so multiple different channels can use that capability.”
Cresp said the team had built its cloud skills and confidence with a mix of online training and Friday afternoon sessions.
Given the bank’s community-first mindset, Cresp said this was a “very Bendigo way of doing things”.
He said the bank was also “very deliberate” with its choice of partners, wanting them to “sit alongside us and teach our people” when working through the shift.
Outside its implementation partner, Cognizant, the bank also partnered with the likes of Accenture, Infosys and MongoDB for “different pieces of work” during the transformation.
Ferocia input
Cresp said Ferocia team members are “involved in this migration” and the bank is “constantly looking for ways” to port capabilities from Up directly into Bendigo.
Bendigo and Adelaide Bank acquired the Melbourne-based fintech, Ferocia, which underpins its banking app and is a joint partner in neobank Up.
At the time, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank said there was a strong motivation for bringing Ferocia in-house, and that it would enable the bank to fast-track its transformation program and digital banking strategy.
“That limitation of being on different platforms now is removed. We’re talking about how can we accelerate that because there’s no doubt the Up team have built a great customer experience,” Cresp said.
He added “there’s some great features there that we’re keen to use.”
Once the bank moves to the cloud it will also enable its digital product owners to move into “a position to better access or be able to move quickly.”
“That’s something that’s going to be really important over the next 12 to 18 months, that we’re able to do that quicker than before”.
He said continuing work will cover “some more consolidations that we’re doing over the next two years”.
“The reality is, can you afford to ever stay still and not continue to transform who you are for your customers?
“Then it’s about how do we deliver awesome customer experiences in the model as a regional bank that’s relevant for Australians? How do we continue to do that and how do we continue to innovate by using partners who want to work with us because we’re nimble and customer-obsessed.”
Digital home loans and lending platforms
Bendigo and Adelaide Bank has also been building out digital home loan capabilities and has plans in place to launch a new lending platform as part of its transformation program this November.
While much of this is still under wraps, Cresp said its cloud work is “locked and aligned completely to that” and that he is “super excited” about the upcoming work.
He said while its lending platform won’t “have a direct relationship” with its current work, they “complement each other.”
Cresp added one “quirky fact” about the project was that May go-live fell in line with its first Bendigo digital platform was deployed 20 years ago.
He also said “we’re also partnering with Google in our data backends and that’s really where an opportunity is for us to use AI and a whole lot of advanced analytics to create better personalisation at the front.
“There’s some great opportunity for AI and personalisation, which will enable us to stick true to our brand of being a great relationship, regional bank and do it in the digital perspective as well.”