Major UK bank

Business challenge

Today’s consumers expect fast banking services, available 24/7. To reduce the risk of service interruptions, a major UK bank wanted greater visibility of its complex IT infrastructure.

Transformation

A major UK bank gained fresh insight into its application landscape with IBM Application Discovery, enabling it to spot opportunities to boost performance and efficiency with minimal effort.

Results

Business challenge story

In the race for customer loyalty

Today’s consumers expect banking services that are always in step with their lives, no matter how fast-paced or 24/7 they are. Consequently, banks are under greater pressure than ever before to maintain exemplary service levels—and failure to deliver on customer expectations puts them at peril of losing hard-won market share. <br><br>The Managing Director of Application Development at a major UK bank comments: “Technology is the enabler behind our services, but it can also be an obstacle. Without insight into the way that applications in our environment are connected, it was not possible for us to make optimizations or changes easily. To minimize the risk of service interruptions paralyzing our ability to innovate or disrupting the customer experience, we needed deeper visibility, and fast.”<br><br>The bank relies on an IBM z Systems® platform to support its core banking system and other business-critical applications. With a highly complex application portfolio that includes over 330,000 batch jobs and 100 million lines of code, it began looking for a solution that could help it seize control.<br><br>

Transformation story

Taking the reins

To increase transparency around its application landscape, the bank deployed IBM Application Discovery. The bank’s spokesperson explains: “We implemented IBM Application Discovery as a repository of record. We feed in application source data from various systems, including our software change manager and automated batch scheduler solutions.”

IBM Application Discovery provides the bank with immediate insight into its end-to-end batch portfolio, the relative priority levels of different jobs, and interdependencies between applications. “We can now identify areas of risk, opportunities for improvement, and the best paths for change with much greater ease,” says the spokesperson.

The bank also eliminated a number of manual tasks as a result of the project. The spokesperson elaborates: “IBM Application Discovery enabled us to automate updates across 190 of our core applications and 330,000 batch schedules.”
 

Results story

Pulling ahead

With the ability to continually optimize its application landscape, the bank has the tools to deliver consistently exceptional services to clients.

“By embracing IBM Application Discovery, we can take a more proactive stance to service delivery,” comments the spokesperson. “Instead of reacting when performance drops, we can take pre-emptive action to ensure that does not happen. Greater service continuity means more satisfied customers, who are more likely to keep coming back to us.”

Moreover, the bank has also succeeded in driving up internal efficiency and removing barriers to innovation.

The spokesperson concludes: “The automation provided by the IBM solution saves us time and reduces the risk of error, enabling us to run more efficient operations. We now have the insight and control to make changes to our application landscape, confident that we understand the ramifications for the rest of our IT environment. Combined, these two factors give us a key advantage over competitors.”

Major UK bank

With more than 700 branches around the UK, this leading bank provides a wide variety of banking services.
 

Solution components

• Banking: App Modernization/Migration to Cloud
• IBM Z Operating System (26)

Take the next step

To learn more about IBM z Systems solutions, please contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit the following website: ibm.com/systems/z

 

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