The Client
The client is one of South Africa's largest financial services groups, operating in 20 countries across Africa and other key markets worldwide. It is Africa’s biggest lender by assets.
The Challenge
Modernizing an aging IT ecosystem
Due to ongoing maintenance issues of their legacy systems, our client needed to modernize their aging IT ecosystem.
To overcome these issues, they started a journey of core banking transformation and as part of the journey, they needed to migrate account information from legacy to the SAP platform. They selected HCLTech as their technology partner for this transformational migration initiative.
- The client had no control of the legacy tool that an external vendor currently managed
- The external vendor’s tool was expensive and complex and could only migrate one product at a time
- Changes to requirements faced a lengthy governance process
- Each migration involved a new contract, resulting in higher lead times and costs
The Objective
Seamlessly migrate accounts from legacy core banking to the new SAP platform
Guided by HCLTech, the bank elected to implement the SAP Banking Services platform to replace their legacy core banking system. Our objective was as straightforward as it was challenging: Develop and execute a simple, phased SAP migration strategy to overcome the identified challenges seamlessly.
The Solution
A product-agnostic technology solution that enabled the migration of multiple products at once
To address the migration challenges, HCLTech recommended migrating to SAP using our product-agnostic solution, eliminating the need for the outside vendor’s tool-based transformation approach. Our solution included enhancements that resulted in minimal development efforts for each subsequent migration.
Our approach enabled the client to achieve several key benefits, including:
Cost savings
The solution removed the dependency on the external vendor for each migration event.
Time savings
Because our solution is product agnostic, migration must no longer be scoped separately for each product, eliminating long and inefficient development processes and fast-tracking the entire product migration journey.
Easier decision making
After removing the product-type dependency, the business could use different parameters to prioritize migration to SAP Core Banking.
Minimized customer disruption
HCLTech used a selective isolation strategy for the migration events, targeting only those customers impacted by the migration. By isolating impacted customers and notifying them in advance via SMS about the temporary outage of their self-service channels, we were able to migrate accounts faster and the bank was able to minimize disruption for their customers.
The Impact
Faster migration with reduced customer impact
The following are measurable benefits as part of the migration program:
- The initial migration timeline was optimized from three weeks to one week, a 67% improvement
- $15 million was saved by creating a simple migration process that removed the external vendor tool and relied on a phased, scalable inhouse solution
- 12 million accounts were migrated based on priorities defined by the bank’s strategic initiative
