Multi-National Bank Uses interop.io to Implement an Innovative Data Delivery Strategy

01. Company

Top 10 North American investment bank and financial services provider that offers advisory and capital market services to corporate, government, and institutional clients worldwide. Additionally, the firm provides services in capital markets and global transaction.

02. Challenge

Centralize engineering and design processes, provide a platform for the decomposition and orchestration of business components – ultimately reducing the time to market for new applications and business services.

03. Introduction

New applications are constantly deployed at the bank to meet ever-changing market conditions and business requirements. These applications are sourced from internal development teams, systems integrators, and third-party independent software vendors. The bank’s desktop landscape is therefore subject to constant change, with new systems often being rolled out before incumbent ones are retired. The IT team of the securities division needed to adopt a new approach to application development and deployment that would empower users with a seamless, unified journey with each new set of capabilities that were delivered.

In collaboration with other business areas such as corporate and investment banking, e-trading, risk and back-office, securities embarked upon a requirements-capture exercise and extensive vendor evaluation to help determine the best course of action.

A proof-of-concept was defined, along with a three-year business case designed to measure the improvements planned for IT, operations, and the various lines of business. The scope of the overall effort is immense, including in-house applications (legacy and new), Microsoft Office, Bloomberg, Tier1 Financial Solutions, Murex etc.

04. Problem

Like their peers across the financial sector, the bank wanted to provide the best possible experience to their employees along with improved levels of customer service. To achieve this, they needed a better way to develop and integrate systems. The emphasis was therefore on making web application development and integration easier than before, while ensuring a cohesive user experience across web and native applications. The initial use cases involved integration of applications of differing types – from simple analytics frontends to mission critical transactional systems. The goal was to break down silos and make it easier to achieve a unified corporate look and feel. In addition, the bank wanted to provide a single access point (and internal search engine) for users to discover new applications and launch existing ones – thus simplifying the rollout of applications across the globe.

To achieve this, the bank sought a single vendor that had the domain expertise and scale to become a global partner, plus a proven track record of having achieved similar results.

05. Vendor Evaluation

When the bank identified their problem and the type of solution needed, they surveyed the vendors in the desktop integration space and began a competitive PoC with the company they assumed to be the market leader plus interop.io.

To the technical evaluation team, it soon became clear that interop.io’s focus on UI orchestration, third-party applications connectivity and significant out-of-the-box functionality made them the preferred solution. In particular, their latest release of multi-app workspace that supported color channels, shared data context and a highly configurable UI offered some quick-wins to accelerate their rollout plans.

Developer Focus

A cursory look at the desktop integration marketplace may leave one with the impression that the vendor products are largely equivalent, and perhaps even fungible. Upon closer examination, application lifecycle management, application launchers, multi-language support, pre-built application connectors, and deployment options for web, as well as natively installed applications were obvious differentiators. Measurable proof of interop.io’s capabilities was realized when the bank was able to reimplement the PoC that had been built with the competitor’s product in a fraction of the time while demonstrating greater functionality.

Expertise

In addition to product depth and breadth, interop.io was the only software vendor able to offer advisory and consulting services using their own staff. This allowed a significant de-risking of the engagement and an acceleration of development plans. Further benefits were realized after adopting interop.io’s implementation methodology and then incorporating that into the bank’s corporate standards to help ensure consistency of UI and appropriate levels of governance across individual development teams.

Collaboration

Throughout the PoC engagement the interop.io team worked collaboratively with the bank’s team, providing product and implementation expertise. A demo environment was jointly established wherein all use cases were developed and tested, even helping to extend scope to demonstrate further differentiation from the other vendors. The teams conducted multiple demonstrations during the evaluation cycle internally, and ultimately succeeded in gaining buy-in across the organization.

06. Solution

Significant progress has been achieved since work began. The solution already comprises a set of configurable workspaces, accessible via a new homepage, each of which has the ability to search and discover corporate applications (and other workspaces) via an interop.io-powered application store. A broader implementation is also underway, helping to push the integration platform into other parts of the business – where it is already acknowledged as the company standard for desktop integration and interoperability.

With this project, the bank is looking to improve its functional, development, and deployment capabilities, and ultimately reduce operational costs. The executive sponsor and head of information delivery views interop.io as a critical element for achieving these goals, in tandem with Bloomberg and Salesforce. interop.io is now one of three strategic vendors in the organization, providing cornerstone desktop integration functionality across several lines of business. interop.io is at the heart of initiatives to integrate the bank’s applications with those from Bloomberg and Salesforce in the areas of investment banking, trading, risk management, and back-office processing.

07. Future Plans

The interop.io implementation in the bank is a multi-year program aimed at integrating desktop applications from across multiple lines of business. The bank’s teams have embraced interop.io’s development methodology, and are constantly improving desktop application development, deployment, governance, design systems, self-service, and knowledge sharing. By taking a holistic approach to implementing a company-wide desktop improvement program, the bank is laying the groundwork for improved user journeys, streamlined workflows, and accelerated desktop integration, with the goal of enhanced productivity and customer-centricity.