Customer Stories
Van Lanschot Uses Digital Transformation To Build Resilient, Future-Proof Operations
Strategic use of Agile helps the oldest bank in the Netherlands maintain its license and realize digital ambitions
Van Lanschot Kempen is the oldest independent bank in the Netherlands and one of the oldest financial institutions in the world. With a history dating back to 1737, the specialist wealth manager offers private banking, asset management, and merchant banking services. Van Lanschot is its private banking arm.
To protect the bank's license to operate, maintain relevance for clients, and build strategic resilience in the wake of COVID-19
Why
Smart digital transformation from a universal bank with a complex business model into a private bank
What
Implementation of the Agile way of working, including show-and-tell ceremonies
How
Provide a Single Source of Truth
Van Lanschot was faced with an existential crisis – the need to retain its license – while being forced to manage the fallout of the coronavirus crisis at the same time. With customer interaction at the center of digital transformation, it quickly became apparent that the bank's IT landscape, including its core CRM system, needed to be modernized. There was no single source of truth of customer data, which made any change to front and back-office processes very complex. The bank needed a strong basis for its digital transformation. What's more, any implementation Van Lanschot chose needed to build flexibility into its technical landscape.
Hybrid Buy-and-Build Model
Van Lanschot faced a dilemma common to many legacy companies: buy or build? The decision was eventually taken to handle front-end development inhouse, and to outsource commoditized backend capabilities, such as payments and mortgage. A major challenge would be finding the right people with the best technical skills. Building a culture of trust was also of paramount importance to creating an Agile environment.
Along the way, the team would also need to factor in new developments such as data science, now considered essential to banking and service organizations, so that the new solutions were not obsolete by the time they were implemented.
“Xebia has been instrumental in realizing our digital ambitions. With their unique combination of digital strategy, technology, and Agile expertise they made the difference. We are now able to release to production 20 times a day as opposed to twice a year.”
David Versteeg
Chief Digital Officer
Agile Shows Business Value And Focuses Development Efforts
With Xebia on board, the team focused on implementing an Agile way of working as a key enabler of the transformation. Agile empowered the team to show incremental business value faster and focus development efforts more effectively. The team created show and tell ceremonies to showcase the value of digital, such as quarterly business reviews (QRBs), and to convince management to continue supporting the project.
New use cases in the cloud for core processes such as transactions monitoring, AML, and commercial triggers were built in line with the bank's core digital ambitions — to differentiate customer-facing processes, optimize operations, and scale.
Van Lanschot's digital transformation initiative has yielded more than the desired outcomes. Besides maintaining the private bank's licence to operate, the working environment resulting from COVID-19 has showcased the bank's resilience and set it up for any operational challenges that may arise in the future.
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