The Business Challenge
An award-winning global Japanese bank has been recognised for consecutive years as a champion for customer excellence. But in one of their markets, the course for delivering a caliber customer experience has been largely facilitated by manual efforts exerted by their internal teams. 

It’s been 20 years since their legacy systems were developed. Aside from lacking core functionalities to facilitate day-to-day operations, there is also limited access to critical data and a big compatibility issue with other technologies. 

There is also a large dependency on the IT Team who needed to get involved in basic daily operational processes like updating customer accounts and currencies. 

Ultimately, this has jacked up the cost of system maintenance, and caused a shortage in IT support resources.

Scope
GrowthOps Asia worked closely with the client to obtain a full picture of their operating workflow and IT review. An overhaul of the following systems was identified:

• Core Banking System: Conduct a local system and gap analysis to initiate the replacement of their 40-year-old core system and integrate it with their regional office system.
  
  
• Cash Management System: Update UI, automate processes and design better data visualisation.
  
  
• Signature Verification System (SVS): Replace the existing custom application with a new web-based system that is compatible with the updated version of MS Windows. It also needs to support RMB as currency and API for signature queries. 
  Loan System - update the legacy system to meet the Libor Discontinuation Requirements. It also should also support all conventional types and enable data validation.
  
  
• API Platform: Build a robust and scalable central API management platform for End User Computing (EUC) and core bank system. 
  

Solution and Implementation
GrowthOps carried out end-to-end support to ensure effective execution while mitigating risks. The following steps were done in phases across all the development projects:

• A detailed audit of the current system, IT environment and business workflows to provide the base for a holistic tech transformation.
• We also formed a joint project team with the internal IT and Business Operations Teams to conduct the core system study. 
  
• Regular workshops with business users to identify detailed business requirements and users' expectations.
• New tech stack recommendations and system infrastructure setup
• Hybrid project approach to design and develop prototypes  
• System testing and customization
• Mitigation approach and work plan
• System migration assistance and parallel run with the legacy systems until the users are confident in running the new system
• Decommisioning of legacy systems