Migrating legacy systems to a digital banking platform

Introduction

Optimizing the digital banking experience

When one of the largest credit unions recognized the need to more effectively serve their members over the long term, they searched for a partner to help them successfully modernize, unify, and streamline their digital banking platform. This large, complex effort entailed building a new set of experiences across channels, migrating services to the cloud, onboarding large delivery teams, introducing a myriad of new technologies and processes to a mature enterprise, ensuring the highest standards of accessibility and security, analytical insight, and change management - all without sacrificing performance or compromising their time to market. This, paired with their efforts to replatform their online banking applications and upgrade their related services, such as analytics, marketing, and security assessments, as well as further develop their digital channels, required a complete overhaul of the client’s digital solutions. 

 

Such a challenging program required significant investment and reliance on a partner with digital and banking expertise.

NCFU Case Intro (1)
Challenge

Lack of
governance and expertise

In any large organization, pockets of teams and service lines can create silos that impede change. Our credit union client was no different, posing a real challenge to forward progress. One of the client’s major needs was to create an organizational structure with clear lines of ownership and accountability for the digital banking program and how decisions would be made along the way to enable success. This challenge led to Mobiquity’s involvement in the credit union’s initiative to build a foundation that they could sustain for years to come. In addition, our team spearheaded the implementations necessary to achieve their strategic banking goals that would ultimately accelerate their digital offerings and change their culture for the better.

NCFU Case Challenge (1)
Solution

Building a technically sound
omnichannel digital banking experience

The credit union agreed that they needed to establish a long-term program to support a technical solution that would move all their online banking to a new platform. With Mobiquity’s guidance, they are delivering new web-based, iOS, and Android applications for their members, as well as a web-based portal for employee access to the same member experience. 

 

Implementing omnichannel banking

The credit union is developing a consolidated approach that unifies online, mobile, and employee banking channels. At the application level, it uses a shared set of dependencies to construct environments for development, testing, and production that can each support the entire end-to-end flow of data and activity on all channels. Significant integration effort with mainframe data and with single-sign-on systems supports this initiative. On the business side, applications themselves are no longer developed by siloed teams with their own release schedules and management structures. Instead, the program orchestrates a team of vertically integrated teams, each of which concentrates on all delivery channels for a given value proposition, such as movement of funds, card management, or access to accounts. The team of teams model, with program level governance, allows the credit union to extend feature prioritization, agile development, quality assurance, and continuous delivery patterns to the enterprise scale. The Mobiquity team guides and advises the customer on every aspect of this program’s implementation, spanning the omnichannel effort horizontally and engaging on it in depth.

 

Replatforming to modern, securer platforms

The credit union is investing in more than just a new online banking experience. They are using this program as a lever to shift their entire digital presence to more modern, resilient, performant, and secure platforms. Existing online banking incorporates over 30 distinct applications, hosted in a variety of models and maintained by disconnected, disparate, siloed teams. In the effort to streamline and modernize their approach, our team is bringing every component of their software delivery approach into unified platforms for each tier of service: cloud hosting, agile development, automated deployments, intelligent security, and even program management. These all needed significant rework in order to consider the solution holistic and ready for growth. This platform shift includes large-scale upskilling efforts within the credit union to be able to identify and resolve problems over the long term. Mobiquity consultants provide key stakeholder input to the broader replatforming effort that will impact the credit union’s organizational structure for years to come.

 

Establishing a technical framework

The technical framework for this unified digital banking approach relies on: 

  • Microsoft Azure cloud hosting foundation, particularly for networking, persistence, an API integration layer, and computing infrastructure.
  • Platform-as-a-service hosting model for service and application orchestration.
  • Comprehensive software development kits (SDKs) to accelerate their creation of bespoke online banking applications across all channels. These SDKs are based on: 
    • Angular framework for the web front end
    • Swift and Kotlin for mobile apps
    • Java with the Spring Boot framework for the backend microservices
  • Azure DevOps for tracking and prioritization of work items, continuous integration and deployment, organizing long-term information in wikis, running structured tests, and integrating the software development work with the organizational delivery in general.
NCFU Case Solution
Results

A full-fledged
digital transformation for the credit union

This ongoing work has catalyzed a fundamental digital transformation for the credit union. As they migrate and evolve to be more digitally-focused, their teams are becoming more comfortable with the changes. The speed of delivering working software to production has improved by orders of magnitude, happening in a matter of days, sometimes hours, instead of months with the legacy systems. The increased tempo of delivery pushes the organization to strengthen its change management and quality assurance practices. 

 

These structural, operational adjustments allow the credit union to meet business-critical goals and feature demands more safely, smoothly, and predictably. This change, in turn, improves the credit union’s member support, and helps them deliver more and more valuable service to their members over time. Our solution with the credit union focuses on their long term strategies. So while we have already added value to the marketing, customer experiences, and ways of working, we continue to push for significant organizational change within the program and across the credit union.

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