Digital Transformation Doesn’t Have to be Painful

Digital transformation can seem like a big and complex step for your financial organization, but with the right strategy, execution, and specified goals, you can realize big benefits in a short time. This can include increased profitability through process improvements for shorter time to market and increasing application updates from 10 per year to four per day. Your enterprise’s market share is dependent on accelerating product improvements and innovations. It’s that type of modernization that brings the bottom-line benefits of improved customer experiences that increases usage and retention.

The biggest roadblock to these goals is that your financial organization struggles with technical debt. The paralyzing effect makes it difficult for IT teams to escape its grasp. But the benefits of modernization far outweigh the risks of not moving forward because the transition to the cloud doesn’t have to be disruptive or impossible. So let’s talk about how you can overcome those challenges and realize the many benefits of modernization and survive the transition!

The digital transformation journey doesn’t need to be a process of application “lift and shift” that seldom works for the applications you really need to move. It also doesn’t have to mean rearchitecting applications to make them cloud native in ways that take years.

The journey has four parts including a culture shift that occurs during the transition. The first step is infrastructure modernization. You will decide which cloud service you want to use and what will be on-premise and in the cloud. The next step is application transformation. Are you using containers? There needs to be a process transformation in order to accommodate the modern infrastructure and applications in the cloud. Finally you need to help your IT team to update their skills so they can manage, maintain, and grow the updated infrastructure and applications.

Infrastructure Modernization

Mainframes too costly to replace and on-prem database systems without scalability are just two areas making up legacy technical debt that holds you back from the cloud. But Techolution has developed proprietary processes we call “modernizing in place” to help you integrate those existing mainframes with cloud-based systems.

Our team brings deep experience in supporting database configuration to cloud-based modernization. Your goal is always to maximize the speed of transactions across mainframes and database access while increasing your long-term scalability. We have proven methodologies to do that efficiently, cost effectively, and incrementally on your timetable and budget.

Application Transformation

Your bank’s applications likely predate your time with the enterprise, and because they grew over time without a distinct plan to keep pace with evolving technology and DevOps processes, they’ve become monolithic.

Once again, there are methodologies that can enable you to modernize these applications in a way that provides the benefits of modern CI/CD pipelines for faster commits, decoupling of applications for autonomous development team updates, and much more. You can do this on your own schedule, so you can get all these benefits today in one form. You can also plan for ultimate application flexibility and modernization through broad containerization and microservices adoption when you’re ready.

Essentially, you can gain a great deal of control with the monolithic app today for easily and efficiently adding new functionalities and increasing transactions and update schedules. You can simultaneously plan for (or take the safe plunge today) for the big bang modernization of breaking up monolithic apps and deploying containerization and microservices broadly. The beauty is that both can take far less time and costs than they have led you to believe with the right modernization partner.

Process Transformation

As we’ve already discussed, your bank’s ability to compete in the digital era of Fintech requires you to speed up and innovate with back-end and front-end (customer facing) processes. Many back-end processes have silos between them and silos making it difficult to reduce friction in front-end or customer-facing processes. It all comes down to each process’s ability to provide customers with faster, more intuitive, and innovative processes that make their banking transactions easier.

Resource Transformation

It’s important to keep in mind infrastructure transformation and application transformation will change processes on the back end for IT personnel (and banking personnel to a lesser degree). This level of process transformation requires a collaborative partnership to ensure IT personnel understand the new methodologies and how system and cloud architecture come together in novel ways.

You should start by providing the educational support from the planning stages through to ongoing usage support after implementation. You’re working with a limited budget, so one thing holding you back with digital transformation is IT personnel skills training. Your team needs the updated skills in cloud architecture and infrastructure modernization integration, which takes time and money.

The Techolution team is a full digital transformation company because we bring the needed personnel dedicated to sharing and collaborating on the knowledge. This ensures your current IT team ends up with the advanced skills to keep the innovation going. The same goes for supporting your financial institution’s departmental teams with the knowledge of new processes. This is tied to making sure the services customers demand are intuitive and simple.

Summary

As you read this blog, it’s apparent to you that these processes and proven technology methodologies connect. You also understand your banking institution needs holistic solutions. They must work across on-prem infrastructure with its legacy systems, monolithic applications, and a developing cloud environment meant to make the most of what you have. You will need a transformation partner that can:

• Reduce Technical debt without costly rip and replace
• Focus on only those applications for migration that bring the biggest ROI
• Enable faster speed to market for application changes, innovation, and development
• Bring these benefits to monolithic applications through limited or full-scale containerization and microservices architecture
• Increase transaction speed and scalability
• Greatly improve customer experience for customer growth and longevity through frictionless services
• Provide the needed architecture modernization, cloud expertise, Devops and CI/CD pipeline knowledge through ongoing education for your IT team

Doing these things cost effectively, efficiently, and quickly (often in 30 days or less) may seem like a tall order, but the Techolution team has been perfecting and proving our methodologies with some of the biggest and most influential banks across the globe.
To see how we can partner with you to make digital transformation happen, download our eBook below.