How did C Ahead Digital help partner bank digitize its functions?

C Ahead Digital provides technology consulting, services and outsourcing. The company, built on values of client needs first, provides comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions. With CiOL, the company, in words of Sandeep Sekhar, Chairman & Global CEO, outlines one of its many success stories of a Leading MNC Bank in EMEA. The undisclosed bank has operations in more than 20 countries, especially in the Retail, Wealth, Commercial and Insurance business.

The Challenge

Being a leading bank in the EMEA Market serves a large pool of customers’ day to day activities through self-service channels. Bank was constantly losing customers to the competition and escalating problems in self-services fallouts due to customer resolution delays and, in some cases, no resolution, causing losses in millions, which gave the competition the edge to walk away with its customers. To summarise the Business Challenges from a technical perspective:

1. Bank was not able to make changes effectively on time or introduce new services on the self-service channels due to multiple legacies and duplicated systems integrated into the supporting application landscape of these self-service channels.
2. There was no complete current architecture to define the scope and mitigate the risk for digital transformations. There were also no associated migrations plans for the future state architecture across these channels, causing technology stalemate.
3. Further, there was no significant source of the document to understand any part of the problem. All the knowledge was also scattered and resided by assumptions in the heads of the staff and ex-staff.

The Solution

C Ahead identified the problem related to missing “As-Is Architecture”. We proposed an urgent need to build “State of the Art Architecture”.  The proposed architecture was “Live and Sustainable” to enable the bank’s team to tackle the problems and also mitigate the associated risk at business and technology levels.

We were a partner to provide a solution to develop blueprints across all the self-service channels; namely POS, ATM, Internet Banking, USSD, IVR, Beyond Payments etc. We, thus, brought in "Live and Sustainable" form.

As a result, the bank to be empowered by:

1. Domain knowledge that is sustainable forever – Overcome the dependency on resource, no man dependency
2. To do operational support and troubleshoot (efficiency ) accurately on the fly; also reduce cost and improves customer satisfaction
3. Faster migration planning in their digital journey.
4. Rationalization to enable in decision making to retire, retain, enhance, outsource, replace or migrate a business value application(s); thus, creating seamless and non-ambiguity business processes implementations

The Team

C Ahead is an organization with 15 years of rich experience in IT Architecture and other services. We also have a skilled expert pool of people, including architects that directly worked with the Father of enterprise architecture, Mr John Zachman and C Ahead proprietary models. A team of over a dozen senior architects and domain specialists were also a part of the team for 9 months. They mapped the business and technology streams.

The Implementation

We follow a model “Well understood challenge is half solved”. So we went about meeting stakeholders across the business and technology chain by interviewing, conducting workshops, conducting knowledge sessions, meetings around 1000+ stakeholders of the bank, extracting the information from the stakeholders literally from their minds, and building the existing AS-IS architecture.

C Ahead team mapped every process, technology, person and reference available to build the model.

Results

We moved away from Visio document to models in creating “Live and Sustainable Architecture” for the bank. Thus, we helped them in the below areas.

1. Efficiency and effectiveness in the operational issue for self-service channels.
2. Migrations made easy
3. Saved Millions that the company lost before
4. Sustained knowledge is a golden reference for the team for life
5. Any new functionality to introduce across these channels is just a cakewalk.