Lombard Odier, a global Swiss private bank is modernising its core banking technology systems and applications with generative AI, reducing technical complexity and accelerating the bank’s innovation journey.
The new initiative has enabled the bank to migrate codes and also move applications quickly from legacy relational databases to MongoDB.
Lombard Odier’s head of technical architecture, Fabrice Bidard said, “Migrating simple code is now 50 to 60 times quicker, and we can migrate small applications 20 times faster to MongoDB. Regression testing also went from three days to three hours with automated test generation.”
As part of its seven-year green transformation program, the bank successfully moved key applications from its SQL database, freeing up developer resources to focus on AI and other next-gen technologies for new customer services.
Bidard said the bank has already seen significant results.
Founded in 1796, Lombard Odier operates 28 offices globally, offering tailored banking services to entrepreneurs, executives, and high-net-worth individuals. The bank also provides a shared technology platform to partner institutions in Switzerland, Europe, the UK, and Singapore.
To drive innovation, minimise service disruptions, and enhance the customer experience, the bank aimed to implement a large-scale transformation consistently across the organisation.
Odier’s technology and Operations leadership team sought a cloud-agnostic database platform with AI capabilities. It partnered with MongoDB to accelerate the modernisation of its systems and integrate AI.
Taking an AI modernisation path
Lombard Odier selected MongoDB as the data platform for its transformation initiative. It initially decided to develop its portfolio management system (PMS), one of its largest applications, used by around 3,000 users on MongoDB.
MongoDB’s scalability was crucial for migrating this system, which manages shares, bonds, ETFs, and other financial instruments. It is also the engine that runs Lombard Odier’s online banking application ‘MyLO’.
The bank also used MongoDB’s Modernisation Factory - a service that helps customers eliminate barriers like time, cost, and risk frequently associated with legacy applications and eliminate technical debt that has accumulated over time.
Bidard said that using the Factory helped automate tasks, speed up app upgrades, and migrate them to MongoDB.
Odier could also create customisable generative AI tooling, including scripts and prompts tailored for the bank’s unique tech stack, which accelerated the modernisation process by automating integration testing and code generation for seamless deployment.
Lombard Odier’s head of technology and operations, Geoffroy De Ridder said their team developed a technology platform that draws on the latest technological innovations to facilitate employees' day-to-day work, and provide clients with individualised investment perspectives.
“We chose MongoDB because it offers us a cloud-agnostic database platform and an AI modernisation approach, which helps to automate time-consuming tasks, accelerate the upgrade of existing applications, and migrate them at a faster rate than ever before
In addition to PMS, Lombard Odier modernised over 250 applications from its existing Java server to its next-generation framework. It also implemented genAI to a marketing app called “Publications” to speed up code migration. The bank’s developers were also able to use Modernisation Factory gen AI based tooling and products to feed into scenarios during regression testing and automatically generate new code much faster than before.
Bidard hopes the bank’s future cloud transition will be smooth, ensuring client data remains secure during its tech upgrade.
“We’re more than halfway through our modernisation initiative, and we’re continuing to industrialise processes. We plan to launch more database migration initiatives with MongoDB in the coming months,” he added.
