Having embarked on an enterprise-wide cloud journey, a leading South African corporate and retail bank is aiming to move 85% of its core systems into the cloud by 2024. As part of this initiative the bank’s VAF business sought to migrate its 45-year old mainframe to a cloud solution. The overall modernisation programme resulted in platform, infrastructure and application modernisation initiatives launched across the bank’s front- and back-office systems.

In line with that, the bank’s vehicle asset finance (VAF) business contracted a software as a service (SaaS) partner to provide a solution to replace their legacy technology stack. As the SaaS provider utilised AWS cloud technology, BSG came on board to enable the design and implementation of the integration layer required to link into the bank’s on-premises supporting systems. As this would be one of the first of the bank’s core banking systems migrated to the cloud, and the fore runner in this space, the team had to ensure that all business, technology and data stakeholders were adequately engaged and consulted, and were comfortable with the function of the integration layer. Given the complexity of the bank’s system landscape, significant investigations into business unit (BU) requirements and negotiations were necessary to ensure the integration solution met all BU requirements.

This is the first core banking system to be successfully migrated to the cloud and will enable the roll-out off the VAF SaaS solution. This core platform modernisation is a big step in the bank’s overall digital journey and will go a long way to ensure the ongoing relevance of the bank in a rapidly changing digital environment.

Additionally, being able to access the system securely via a web-portal means the bank’s staff are able to manage the business from anywhere, significantly improving the service they can offer customers, particularly during times when they are required to be away from the office. Reduced time required to implement changes, enables the bank to manage business needs on-the-fly, significantly improving its ability to respond to disaster management situations. A fully managed SaaS solution ensures increased stability of this core banking platform. Furthermore, two-way data transfer between the SaaS solution and the bank’s on-prem systems, results in clean data, in the correct format being securely accessible to the necessary personnel and systems across the bank. This will go a long way to enabling a single view of customer across business units.