The Financial Services industry has some unique challenges when it comes to adopting DevOps practices. While many “newer” businesses were blessed with the ability to begin as online entities, some long-standing banks have had to work backwards in order to keep up with the times. This can result in slow delivery times from idea to customer, lots of manual scripting with slow adoption of automation, inability to collect data during the delivery process, error-prone processes, and more.

But, there is hope!

Financial institutions CAN adopt DevOps practices successfully with a DevOps Platform that can tie together all of their existing tooling with visibility, data collection and analysis, automation, and more!

Check out these transformations:

BankZ

BankZ is in the same boat as all financial services companies – evolve their digital business strategy quickly or lose customers to competitors that do. After seeing excellent results with Continuous Integration, deployment automation, and automated testing initiatives, Bankz looked for a pipeline orchestration solution as the next step in their Continuous Delivery journey.

Challenge

BankZ had been successful with their early CD initiatives to improve their software delivery process. After seeing results using Jenkins for CI and XL Deploy for their automated deployment processes, they knew pipeline orchestration was the next step. BankZ needed a pipeline orchestration tool that could provide reporting, metrics, and analytics; enforce enterprise-grade controls; and be easy to maintain at large scale.

Solution

After comparing multiple tools, BankZ decided to use XL Release to help with their next phase of CD. This solution provided BankZ with easy to use tools for release orchestration, pipeline management, and deployment automation. For the first time ever, BankZ has visibility into release status, failures, and bottlenecks and 100% of the reporting they need to meet security, compliance, and ROI requirements. They standardized the release process across pipelines regardless of application stacks. BankZ is now able to deliver software faster, with a repeatable and scalable process and within their tolerated level of risk.

Results

• 25,000+ release scripts were reduced down to eight standardized release templates
• Time required to deliver new functionality was reduced from six months to three weeks
• 60 applications were released in 3 weeks during the initial rollout
• Developers produced hundreds of new features in the time it previously took to deliver less than 12
• XL Release is now managing pipelines for 900+ applications
• Releases that took eight hours minimum now complete in under 30 minutes on average, including verification checks
• Releases are predictable and have 80% fewer failures

Rabobank

The Rabobank Group is a multinational banking and financial services company headquartered in Utrecht, the Netherlands. It is a global leader in food and agricultural financing and in sustainability-oriented banking. Rabobank is one of the largest cooperatives in the Netherlands, with more than two million members. In terms of Tier 1 capital, the bank is one of the 30 largest financial institutions in the world. The company has hundreds of in-house and customer-facing applications, written in various languages and frameworks, running on IBM Nonstop, z/OS, AIX, Red Hat Linux, and Windows, with various kinds of middleware.

Challenge

Rabobank struggled with very long delays between idea generation and go-live application of these ideas. Deployments were manually intensive, and deployment failures were very common: >20% failed or delayed. These challenges became totally unacceptable. Rabobank needed a solution that would address ALL of these problems, not just one.

Solution

Rabobank chose XL Deploy as their Application Release Automation software. By automating application deployment, improving quality, ensuring compliance, and saving on operational costs, Rabobank finally found a solution that addressed all of their challenges.

Results

After only one year using XL Deploy, Rabobank was able to:

• Reduce time spent carrying out software deployment by 60%
• Implement continuous delivery of applications
• Eliminate 99% of errors in the application release process
• Accelerate time-to-market from weeks to hours
• Cut development costs
• Free up developers to create software that adds value to Rabobank’s business
• Greatly accelerate application deployments
• Eliminate deployment errors
• Gain visibility into and oversight of development process
• Enable developers to focus on building software with business value

Global 20 Bank

This Global 20 bank has more than 33 million customers and locations in more than 40 countries worldwide. The Lease IT team supports five major countries. As the banking industry becomes more and more competitive, the IT group has their hands full keeping up with ever-changing and urgent business needs across countries. The team knows they need to work smarter to survive, so they use the most modern processes and tools to stay ahead. Continuous Delivery (CD) and DevOps practices are very high priorities for them.

Challenge

This Global 20 bank struggled with slow, manual, and error-prone processes that offered no visibility into release status and bottlenecks, and no way to collect release metrics.

Solution

After comparing several tools, this Global bank decided to automate and orchestrate the release pipeline with XL Release in order to accelerate software delivery, ensure that ING development and compliance standards are met, and provide visibility into every step of the process.

Results

• Reduced release time from test environment into production from six weeks to 34 minutes
• Deployed twice a day to Dev environment to get fast and early feedback
• Predictable results: only one incident in eight months, instead of multiple incidents with every release

Learn More

• Start your free trial of the XebiaLabs DevOps Platform today!
• See what powers the end-to-end Continuous Delivery process of these financial services companies.
• Download the white paper: The IT Manager’s Guide to DevOps

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