Delivering cost optimization and scalability to a pioneer commercial bank

Background & Challenges

One of pioneer commercial banks established in early 1940s with a rich business legacy in serving the trading, agriculture and manufacturing sectors. It subsequently undertook a major growth and diversification plan under a new management and eventually became a publicly listed bank. It currently services over 4.90 million customers through a network of 266 Branches, 199 Banking Outlets and 369 ATMs spread across 20 Indian states and Union Territories. It has assets of around US$7.3 billion (2017) and a business revenue of nearly Rs. US$670 million as of December 31, 2017.

The Bank’s pursuit for rapid growth to emerge as fastest growing private sector banks and to expand its presence across the country required it to adopt technologies that would not only allow it to scale seamlessly but also at a very low cost. The Bank wanted to increase its geographical footprint by setting up 40 – 50 new branches and over 250 ATMs every year. At the same time, the bank wanted to overhaul its product and services offering to its customers by deploying cutting edge core banking system (CBS), internet Banking for both Corporate and Retail Customers, SMS Banking, and to introduce credit cards, debit cards, etc. This required the bank to create a highly flexible workforce with anywhere, anytime and any device access to data and applications, and to ensure that the employees had high productivity with minimal interruptions due to IT issues. All this had to be achieved while lowering cost of application delivery per user.

The bank’s requirements were individually straightforward, yet the combination of requirements made the new technology implementation incredibly complex:

• The new technology would be required to scale along with the bank’s existing operations.
• The entire transformation would have to maintain IT costs and resources at manageable levels even though it needed to supported growth.
• Expansion to Tier-II & Tier-III cities, as well as rural and unbanked areas, meant that the new technology would have to work in bandwidth-restricted areas, and had to be managed remotely.
• A completely new core banking application had to be rolled out at the same time with zero business disruption.
• The current distributed infrastructure management practice had to be completely overhauled and converted into a centrally managed operation.
• To accommodate the requirement to provide end-user’s with anytime, anywhere, any device access to data and applications and implementing a BYOD policy.
• Ensure improved end-user experience.

What Anunta Did

Realizing the scale and complexity of the implementation, concurrent with the core banking system roll-out, Anunta’s Design & Consulting services conducted a detailed study on all infrastructural dependencies including the most micro dependencies, right from desktop peripherals like printers and fonts to application speeds. Anunta prepared checklists and baselines for all layers – hardware, network, storage, Hypervisor, OS and applications.

As part of the Onboarding process, Anunta ensured all major configurations were readied, including infrastructure to manage multiple Operating System builds to face any compatibility issues from an application perspective. The end-point roll-out and installation documents and requisite staff trainings were conducted. Anunta conducted the datacenter fine-tuning ensuring that hardware, storage networking, virtualization and application virtualization worked in sync with each other to create a highly available system that allowed for dynamic resource management of the hosted virtual machines. This included testing connectivity from all locations to ensure an unhampered ends-user experience.

Within a month’s time, Anunta conducted user acceptance testing for around 800 simultaneous user sessions to the Cloud. Subsequently, Anunta enabled the bank to adopt virtual desktops on Cloud for over 1,000 users from 120 branches across India.

Value Delivered

• Centralized management: Adoption of a centrally hosted, remotely monitored model enabled the bank to provide enhanced security, increased IT effectiveness and better ROI for IT expenses. Anunta has been consistently providing the bank with above 80% proactive issue resolution and an incident-to-user ratio of 0.01 as opposed to industry standard of 0.8-1.2.
• Seamless roll-out: The solution effected concurrent core banking solution roll-out for over 1,000 end-users, with zero business interruption.
• Improved end-user experience: With improved management and better access to applications and data on the go, the bank witnessed significant improvement in end-user experience and productivity.

99.98%

Improved application delivery: Anunta’s intelligent system design enabled the bank to provide its end-users with above 99.98% application availability consistently.

Support

Enhanced support: Move to a cloud-based architecture enabled the bank’s IT team to support business by achieving RBI stipulated goals on inclusive banking by lowering cost of IT while moving to remote locations where IT support is hard to come by.

25%

Cost reduction: The new virtualized desktop infrastructure solution significantly lowered the cost of application delivery per user per month by approximately 25%.