Business Banking Engineering Lab

Client

This client, a large Australian bank, has a large internal workforce serving upwards of 10,000,000 customers at more than 1,000 locations in Australia, New Zealand and around the world.

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Challenge  

The client has embarked on a strategy to re-establish an in-house engineering capability with the goal of enabling critical stability, reliability and performance levels within its mission-critical banking platforms.

Business Banking Engineering Lab has been set up as the vehicle for re-establishing this capability for the Origination and Credit Decisioning service. The client has been seeking to build sufficiently skilled and experienced technical teams for this new facility and has found that the recruitment process has taken considerably longer than expected. As a result, the client has concluded it requires assistance to progress critical delivery activities; to provide additional engineering capability to support specific, priority projects and to solidify the new Lab’s engineering capability, particularly in the areas of AWS cloud services and architectures.

The client also recognised that a long term engagement would enable further cost reduction in the engagement of FinXL resources, endeavouring to ensure that engagement commitment was 12 months minimum.

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FinXL Solution  

FinXL's solution was to build flexible teams that carried out the following:

• Provided AWS domain expertise and technical leadership; the Business Banking Engineering Lab team is in the process of gaining this expertise but the FinXL engagement will serve to fast track and cement this knowledge and capability.

• Provided domain expertise and technical leadership capabilities from recent FinXL engagements and initiatives which will help to build the client’s core engineering capability for microservices “build and run” in the cloud.

• Built self-sustaining engineering teams with a strong focus on Product goals and DevOps culture. Assisted with recruiting and training FTE’s e.g. shortlisting, interviews, and recommendations.

• Developed a training plan and trained team leads:

• Promoted methods such as Retros, 1:1s, Pairing, and continuous feedback to the team.

• Worked with existing and new teams established on specific deliverables such as:

• Document Management

• Other deliverables as identified by stakeholders

• Determined what team structure approaches such as Product teams, Site Reliably Engineering or Production Engineering are a fit for the client.

• Focussed on ‘build to run’ vs. ‘build to release’.

• Embedded test automation into the delivery process (minimum is unit tests and where possible performance, integration, regression and smoke tests).

• Built strong skills in continuous delivery, Java, Node.js, REST, AWS, Automation, and Operations.

• Showcased work done at the end of every sprint.

Finally, from an overall engagement perspective, given the client was able to commit to a 12-month plus engagement. As a result, FINXL was able to engage our permanent Consultants rather than contract Consultants, thereby reducing the overall cost to the client by approximately 10%.

Outcome

Deliverables successfully completed as follows:

As stated above being able to utilise our permanent Consultants to implement the work reduced the overall cost to the client by approximately 10%.