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ABN AMRO
The rise of the Phoenix
Amsterdam, Netherlands
At a Glance
• Reduced time to configure, test, and deploy software change from weeks to days since deploying Temenos Continuous Deployment.
• 25% reduction of IT development costs for regulatory changes
• 300% growth in the international business since 2012
In the 2008 financial crisis, ABN AMRO faced an existential threat initially being acquired by a consortium of banks under the name RFS Holdings and subsequently coming under the control of the Dutch government. Today, it has risen like a phoenix from the ashes to become a healthy, profitable global banking institution, and they are one of the largest and most innovative banks in Europe.
Temenos has supported ABN AMRO every step of the way providing solutions for international corporate banking, private banking, and global international payments.
Reducing the Cost of Global Compliance
The close collaboration and strategic relationship with ABN AMRO continues as we support the bank in achieving its vision, the power of ONE, ensuring that the bank is able to take advantage of our investment, not only in terms of enhanced functionality and technology, but also in terms of global and local compliance with requirements such as CRS, FATCA, IFRS9 and other regulations that banks must adhere to wherever they are doing business.
ABN AMRO has signed a multi-year subscription extension with Temenos. The extended agreement includes access to Temenos Continuous Deployment as-a-service for the bank’s 22 DevOps teams to continue creating and launching new offerings quickly. This latest commitment to the Temenos Banking Cloud demonstrates ABN AMRO Bank’s confidence in the platform’s maturity and composable banking services to increase agility and pace of innovation. Using the cloud-based Temenos platform, the bank will be able to test and develop software in a secure environment, and complete coding, and bring new releases to market within 24 hours. ABN AMRO estimates that the Temenos tools will help it to increase the efficiency of its early-stage testing by 30%, the number of daily test pipelines by 150%, and test cycles by a factor of 10—leading to more frequent and effective innovation. Since adopting Temenos Continuous Deployment in 2019, ABN AMRO Bank has reduced the time to configure, test, and deploy software changes from weeks to days.
With Continuous Deployment on the Temenos Banking Cloud, we empower our DevOps teams to develop new services and get them to the market much faster. We see a future of banking fully in the Cloud, and this further collaboration with Temenos takes us one step closer to that vision.”
Friso Westra, Head of IT Development Core Banking International at ABN Amro
International Corporate Banking in 9 Countries
The Temenos relationship began in 2008 when the bank merged with the Dutch arm of Fortis Bank which left the new entity with International Operations but no IT platform to support them.
The bank chose to implement the Temenos core banking software for corporate banking. They wanted to ensure that each overseas corporate banking line of business had a standardized target-operating model for business processes, products, and services, essentially allowing the bank to define its own “best practice” and ensure that this would be followed globally.
This would enable the bank to deliver consistent levels of customer experience to its large corporates wherever in the world they are banking. It would also enable the bank to easily grow its geographic distribution reach by quickly expanding into other countries.
This initial International Corporate Banking project included 8 countries; Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, UAE, Belgium, Germany, the UK, and the USA running from two hubs, one in the Netherlands and the other in Singapore.
Thanks to Temenos’ innovative Continuous Deployment product, we can gain greater product agility and improved time-to-value, accelerating the speed of innovation and making business changes rapidly. Temenos Continuous Deployment is to provide high levels of automation to support our agile development approach. Temenos Continuous Deployment will allow our developers to focus more time on the value of their deliverables spending less time coordinating testing and deployment with other teams.”
Friso Westra, Head of IT Development Core Banking International at ABN Amro
Global Payments Hub – Strategic Co-Development Relationship
In 2012, having rolled out international corporate banking to 9 countries, the bank began to look at the quality and capability of its in-house payments system. The bank decided that it needed to replace this given the outlook and direction that the future payments industry was heading.
Why take the risk of building a new payment system when there are many well-known payment software providers on the market that were evaluated by the bank? Simply put, these solutions suffered from the fragmentation and siloed designs that come with evolution over time. ABN AMRO was looking for a single global payments hub for both high and low-value payments, for domestic and international payments with the ability to support all the countries that the bank does business in.
Given the anticipated move to digital money, the growth in online shopping, and real-time payments in-country and cross-border; the application would be designed to effortlessly scale as required. Critical to achieving this scalability would be ensuring an extremely high STP rate based on the data-driven rules-based configuration of the payment process.
Germany became the first country to be on-boarded to the ABN AMRO Temenos Payments in September 2015. The UK, Belgium, and the bank’s Diamond and Jewellery line of business followed after that, and all have been on-boarded taking 6 months on average to onboard each country. The bank believes in the power of ONE, thus all geographies and all lines of business will make and receive payments through the centralized Global Payments.
Private Banking in 3 Countries – Project ONE
The IT strategy established at the outset for the international corporate banking implementation was based on the concept of “ONE” across four pillars; ONE Operating Model; ONE Application Landscape, ONE Code Base and ONE Technical implementation. This is intended to maximize re-use and drive simplicity, which in itself will achieve business and IT cost efficiencies and economies of scale across the international lines of business.
When the Bank began looking at its Private Banking business across the globe in 2015, it decided to implement the Temenos Wealth Front Office componentized offering to stay in line with their Project ONE strategy. This would extend the use of the Temenos core banking application to cater for back-office processing for Private Banking, reusing many of the modules already implemented for corporate banking. Temenos core banking would replace the bank’s vendor provided legacy application.
In addition, the Bank would upgrade its Temenos digital front office portfolio management system, formerly known as Triple-A Plus, to integrate to Temenos core banking. This provided complete end-to-end processing for the Private Banking and Wealth line of business, all within the Temenos Wealth Front Office offering.
Project ONE included 3 countries, Belgium, France and Germany and is ongoing progress.
Working with Temenos business partner Cognizant, ABN AMRO recently implemented Temenos Wealth Front Office in Belgium, the first location to go live on the new platform. By moving to a single, standardized core banking solution for its private and corporate banking businesses, ABN AMRO bank will reduce its operational costs and improve its cost-to-income ratio. Using the Temenos solution will also enable the bank to accelerate the development of new personalized products and services, and streamline internal business processes.
We selected Temenos as our technology partner to future-proof the ongoing growth of our private bank. Working closely with Temenos and our implementation partner, Cognizant we experienced a smooth go-live. I am excited as this is a big step for ABN AMRO in harmonizing our IT infrastructure and speeding up digitization. We run our corporate and part of our private banking operations now from one single digital platform. We expect IT costs savings and efficiencies from the standardization of processes and products. With Temenos Wealth we are confident of achieving our ambition in offering the most innovative wealth management products and services in the industry.”
Friso Westra, Head of IT Development Core Banking International at ABN AMRO
Temenos Ambassador Awards 2022
Delighted to recognize Friso Westra of ABN AMRO as the winner of the Visionary Leadership Award for his commitment to innovation, his cohesive DevOps strategy, and collaboration with Temenos