IBS Journal September 2015
ING overhauls transaction banking software
The priority was placed on the new
portal, InsideBusiness, that is aimed to become ultimately a single point of entry for every product and service ING offers to its corporate clients. The portal is developed in-house (with the exception of the securi- ty aspect, which involves third parties) and comprises ‘hundreds of developers’. The portal has five major functions:
payments, cash management, FX, lend- ing and a service centre for things like confirmations and agreements. At pres- ent, customers can manage mass pay- ments, see a total liquidity view based on all their accounts and fund flows housed at ING, do basic hedging and monitor bilateral borrowing with the bank. InsideBusiness is now in a testing phase with 60 customers in the Neth- erlands, and is also being extended to Belgium. ‘We are targeting the end of the summer for all of Europe, and the full launch is scheduled for the spring 2016,’ says Buitenhek. The bank opted for a gradual approach, and the expectation by the end of this year, the single sign-on functionality will be completed, and that the following year ‘we’ll move everything and everyone on to the portal’. Another recent milestone has been
the InsideBusiness mobile app for iOS and Android smartphones and tablets, launched on 1st July. This adds com- plexity to the security of transactions and requires a completely new set-up. ‘Imagine wiring $1 billion from your iPhone,’ Buitenhek says. Customers can get real-time
insights, use order management and connect to Swiftnet payment files on their mobile devices. Buitenhek notes that customer feedback is welcome as it will be used to develop the app fur- ther. Functionality under development includes FX spot, forward and swap transactions, remote authorisations for order management and accessing reports from the download centre. ‘This undertaking has required
huge cooperation of the IT, business
and project teams.’ Modern APIs were
developed to connect the portal with the back office software. ‘In the end, it is the interfacing that kills you,’ he notes. The bank uses Tibco for middleware.
What’s at the back office? There is a lot of modern- isation happening at the back-end too. The goal is to standardise, harmonise and centralise as much as possible. ‘Core banking land-
scape redesign’ is taking place group-wide, which comprises the implementa- tion of Misys’ Trade Innova- tion (TI) for trade finance and LoanIQ for syndicated lend- ing (click here for a detailed case study), Infosys’ Finacle for core operations on the deposits side, SAP for lending and Dovetail for payments. For TI, all activities in Asia have been finalised and the solution off- shored to a local centre there, and the work is now moving to Europe, with a country-by-country roll-out. Dovetail’s payments hub is also a
work in progress. The SAP venture is further ahead,
with Buitenhek highlighting the ‘incredible discipline’ of the vendor and the project as a significant contributing factor to ‘a very successful result’. The Finacle project has been under-
way in Belgium for some time now. It has been challenging, admits Buitenhek. However, he feels that the vendor, ‘as a corporation, is moving in the right direc- tion’ (there was a senior management shake-up last year in the Finacle unit, and it is now in the process of being merged with another Infosys entity, Edgeverve). ‘We are making good pro- gress with the implementation.’
...continued from front page
Mark Buitenhek, ING
Challenges and benefits ING applies the agile scrum meth- odology in its projects, which comes with its own set of challenges. ‘Communication, connecting all the dots – this is the biggest challenge,’ muses Buitenhek. In an agile approach, it is important to be able to success- fully delegate more to lower levels, he adds, to prioritise, and also to ensure that everyone understands that every development undertaken is for the benefit of the client and the bank. Celebrating successes, even small ones, helps. ‘At this day and age, you cannot wait for five years to celebrate success,’ he comments. The benefit of an agile meth-
od is the bank’s ability to cope with unexpected changes, as the latest market developments involving RBS and Standard Chartered have demon- strated, he points out. ‘We are well positioned to benefit,’ he concludes. Tanya Andreasyan
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© IBS Intelligence 2015
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