Banking on Alfabet
            

This leading global financial services company offers a wide range of wealth management and investment banking services, positioning itself as an entrepreneurfocused bank. With more than 500 billion euros of assets in 2017, this is one of the largest banks in Europe.

This leading European bank is renowned for advising its clients in all aspects of finance, across the globe and around the clock. Today, the longestablished institution aims to become a more entrepreneur-focused bank by leveraging its strengths in wealth management and investment banking. From its European headquarters to its branches around the world, this leading global bank is endowed with a clear and transparent mission. IT is on multi-year journey to support the bank’s business strategy with transparency and effective management of its IT landscape.

Back in 2008, the bank’s array of applications were divided into three separate repositories. In reality this split divided the bank’s IT landscape into separate islands for private banking, investment banking and technical infrastructure.

This disconnected web of applications was in danger of inflating costs, impeding compliance with new banking regulations, and leaving management ill prepared for an industry-wide digital transformation. So the bank did what it knows it does best: It made a very clever investment into its future.

Toward a trusted IT portfolio management system

The bank’s IT team found its fix with Alfabet, Software AG’s “whole view” IT planning and portfolio management solution. Alfabet, part of Software AG’s Digital Business Platform, promised just what the bank needed: a comprehensive and accurate overview of its application landscape; extensive reporting capabilities for management, risk and audit compliance purposes; and the analytics and insights to help its leaders make robust, fact-based, strategic decisions.

The bank adopted Alfabet in 2008 and its IT team quickly tackled the first item on its to-do list: merging its three repositories into one. Alfabet proved ideal for harmonizing IT assets and led to critical functional improvements.

Then, in 2014, the bank decided it was time to leverage this investment further. In close consultation with Software AG, it adopted Alfabet’s array of monitoring and strategic planning capabilities— which proved essential as the bank took steps to move from leveraging Alfabet as an operational inventory toward using it as a key tool to support strategic IT planning. “Alfabet has been essential to our development of a top-class enterprise architecture management system,” says the Head of Enterprise Architecture Tools & Services. “It becomes a highly trusted source of operational as well as strategic insights.”

Meanwhile, Alfabet has been tightly integrated into the bank’s management, control and oversight systems, including infrastructure provisioning, application access control, IT license management, IT risk management, IT service management, IT finance management, IT operations monitoring, disaster recovery, business capability management, solution delivery change control and many more. This provides a very high degree of transparency and enables fact-based decision making end to end across strategic planning, enterprise architecture management, IT investment management, change execution and operations.

In effect, Alfabet is at the core of a wide ecosystem of tools and processes that is critical to the bank’s operations.

From data to digitalization

Alfabet’s benefits are many. With its applications now all in one place, this bank has been able to avoid unnecessary projects, re-use assets and identify new company-wide synergies. All of this has helped the bank save money.

With company analytics now easily accessible, complying with the banking industry’s onslaught of new regulations has become a lot less cumbersome than in the past. This data has also given management new insights into the bank’s enterprise architecture landscape— including its complexity, capabilities, risks, redundancies and opportunities. Critically, this has helped the bank make more informed, strategic decisions.

“The data Alfabet provides keeps getting better and better,” says the Head of Enterprise Architecture Tools & Services. “The IT team is now an invaluable source of insights for the bank.” Alfabet is also set to become a core enabler of a major bank priority moving forward: increased digitalization. The department head envisions using Software AG technology more to create enhanced data visualizations, better align and steer the bank’s digital technology capabilities, and also support the bank’s strategy to leverage new technologies like AI, robotics and machine learning as well as its journey towards a cloud-based and DevOps-enabled infrastructure. Already, thanks to Alfabet, the bank has most of the needed tools, APIs and processes to enable this strategy.

Software AG, through its Global Consulting Services and Alfabet Global Competence Center, will continue to play a key supporting role—as it has throughout the now decade-long partnership.