$1.4T Global Bank saves $5M using a single enterprise architecture repository to manage applications, risk, and compliance

Transforming banking platforms into digital businesses while managing risk

The financial crisis of 2018 was a clarion call to the banking industry that the assessment and measurement of risk had failed to keep pace with the increasing complexity of financial products. During the decade since the great recession, the combination of legally mandated transparency into the financial health of banks and greater sophistication in tools to monitor and assess risk has restored investor confidence and facilitated a dramatic rebound in the financial strength and profitability of the banking system.

Significant investment in information technology has been a principal driver of the revitalization of the banking industry. In the early years following the financial crisis, IT investment was focused on risk; in recent years, it has focused on transforming banking platforms into digital businesses. A challenge of this dramatic investment in IT has been the increased complexity of managing an ever-growing portfolio of IT assets (hardware and software). This challenge is all the more significant due to the increased dependence of disparate business units on technologies to deliver their business capabilities.

A Global Bank with $1.4 trillion in assets faced these same challenges, needing to:

• Improve their ability to manage an extensive portfolio of IT assets
• Integrate legacy systems into a unified ecosystem after a recent acquisition
• Provide senior leadership with a comprehensive application inventory assessment and how they were deployed across the organization.
• Select a platform that could dynamically inventory applications in a central repository, assess product and vendor risk, and monitor for compliance issues.

This Company chose MEGA's HOPEX solution after extensively reviewing competitive offerings. The Global Bank referred to Gartner's Enterprise Architecture Magic Quadrant as a basis to short-list top vendors and solicit formal Request for Proposal (RFP) responses. HOPEX was ultimately selected based on the extensibility of its platform to support both application portfolio management and enterprise architecture capabilities. Further, HOPEX's unique central repository to address multiple use cases was a key differentiator compared to the other vendors considered during the RFP evaluation.

“In one year, due to demand from the internal organization, the tool is integrated with several operating systems since it became the golden source for application information. The HOPEX repository is the center of our world for cataloging applications/ systems at our Company. We saved $5M in our frst year of using HOPEX.”
Project Lead Sponsor

Creation of one central IT repository, reducing complexity and increasing visibility of IT assets

This Company's primary objectives were to:

• Set up an IT asset repository
• Assess IT assets' health based on cost, life cycle, and technical efficiency.
• Map IT assets to business capabilities as a basis to perform current state and future state transformation planning.

MEGA worked with the Global Bank on several challenges

Inventory IT assets

The Company was able to catalog over 3,500 IT applications (previously inaccurately thought to be 1,500) and 5,300 software products, along with additional business applications and servers. This robust asset inventory allowed the Company to have one central IT repository, reducing complexity and bringing visibility to its IT assets. This increased visibility allowed the Company to create an impact analysis, anticipate business and technology risks, and support new business initiatives through greater flexibility.

Assess the health of IT assets

Having set up a repository and established the attributes to be measured across the portfolio, the Company could move to the next level and evaluate the health of its portfolio.
Examples of this impact include: 

• The Company generated significant cost savings by identifying 10% of its applications that were unutilized and were therefore decommissioned.
• Another essential contributor to portfolio health is the ability to map applications to application owners and create workflows requiring owners to periodically attest the applications to ensure they meet specific performance criteria. Significant improvements in data quality and the timeliness of reporting increased the likelihood that the Global Bank maintains compliance with federal and state regulatory requirements.
• Another benefit is conducting impact analysis and more advanced reporting to manage KPIs and mitigate gaps. 

Transformation planning

The data generated by the HOPEX repository gave the Global Bank the unique ability to identify and prioritize projects by performing multiple "what-if" analyses to determine which scenario to implement. The Company could efficiently run reports and complete ad-hoc studies for strategic planning, paving the way for future digital transformation and strategic business decisions. Further, all this vital information allowed the Company to compare scenarios using various criteria and improve IT portfolio performance by collecting ideas from multiple stakeholders in one centralized repository.

A comprehensive IT portfolio that aligns with the business capability model and increases data quality

MEGA's HOPEX Platform is the record system for all applications across this Global Bank's eight US entities. It gives them a fully connected and complete technology portfolio that aligns with their business capability model.

In addition to the above immediate benefits, the Global Bank was able to:

• Review 3rd-party vendor applications to identify which applications are on the Cloud or on-premise and which were redundant, helping them to save $5M in just one year and further strengthen its go-forward approach to working with vendors. 
• Leverage the data to build and deploy a new HR system for US entities affecting every employee.
• Build a strategy around which technology and applications they could consolidate and move to a new shared data center.
• Drive broader engagement across the bank, its entities, and users, thereby helping to ensure data quality.
• Realize greater clarity in how the Global Bank's assets are applied and managed across the entities, thereby providing auditors with a complete view of their operations from a data and technology perspective.

Solutions

• HOPEX IT Portfolio Management
• HOPEX Platform
• MEGA Services Team