At Citibank Asia, the CEO has set forth a new strategy to drive digital transformation and rejuvenate operations to improve agility, reduce costs, and focus on quality. In doing so, the company built simple systems for a remarkable customer experience to ensure that they do not lag behind their competitors.
This led senior IT executives to select TIBCO as their digital transformation strategic partner in order to revamp its strategy, improve its agility, innovation, and flexibility, as well as produce fast results.
Citibank has worked with TIBCO since 2007 when they wanted to establish an events platform using TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks and TIBCO Messaging software. Working with TIBCO Professional Services Group, Citi relied on their guidance to ensure that their various solutions are used effectively.
One of the key challenges faced was defining services and the service management lifecycle – which is a functional concept, not a technical implementation.
An advantageous partnership
- Strategy
Citibank is establishing its cloud, APIs and microservices, starting with microservices to gain agility by defining each business domain in one viable product, and then focusing on each one individually to get the desired speed.
“In the last five years, we have standardised our middleware, which is the integration layer, and TIBCO BPM, to expose our credit initiation and service processes. Next we will move into cloud-ready integration platforms,” said Himanshu (HeMan) Shrivastava, Director of Applications at Citibank Asia.
- Flexibility
Using TIBCO BusinessWorks software, Citibank implemented a solution in Asia that can be encapsulated and implemented in the US or Mexico. Then, through TIBCO BPM, the solution helped to create and standardise processes. This gave Citibank the flexibility to tailor to across markets whilst keeping the standardisation.
- Visible results
To enable straight-through processing for credit card applications, Citibank looked to their assets in TIBCO that could be reused as it was looking at a quick turnaround. It took their BusinessWorks and BPM assets, combining them, and managed to deliver their solution much faster.
“Customers used to get a card in one to two weeks. Now card preapproval takes 10 to 12 minutes and the card can be delivered to door steps within 2 days,” said Shrivastava.
“It used to take six months to deploy new processes. We now do four major releases a year, one monthly minor release, and have the capability to do a production cut over to more than 10 countries across Asia in a single weekend—24,000 man days of code gets deployed without issues.”
Future developments
As Citibank continues rolling out new developments with TIBCO, it hopes to successfully provide all retail banking services on mobile, reduce the cost of servicing customers through the new platform, and reduce the time taken to deploy solutions.
“Now the business is thinking differently about how we use the platform and events for new business cases and new revenue generating models. The key goal, radical digitisation, means that we provide all retail banking services on mobile. That’s first,” said Shrivastava.
“Second is the cost of servicing the customer through the new platform has to reduce. And third is the cost of infrastructure and time to market. It still takes a couple of months to deploy new ideas, but that’s too slow. We want it to be days.”
