Reflecting on Advanzia’s digital transformation

​Johann Blais, Advanzia’s Head of Architecture and Technology, shares his thoughts on the substantial progress made digitalising processes at Advanzia in 2021.

December 20th, 2021 - The past year was again shaped by the pandemic, but for Advanzia Bank, the acceleration of our digital transformation and continued business growth meant that 2021 was another successful year. It saw us enter into a new market and launch new mobile apps and customer portals.

How would you describe Advanzia’s approach to digital transformation?

Advanzia’s ambition is to create an end-to-end digital business model. Achieving this ambition requires sophisticated technical architecture. Our credit card customers expect a flawlessly digital and seamless journey across all touchpoints, regardless of where they are, how they are paying (for example by card, smartphone, smart watch, etc.) and what channel they are using (e.g. the Advanzia app or our web portal). The temptation for digital banks is to focus on providing a fancy frontend, which provides a user-friendly entry point for the customer. But without an efficient backend, processing would require slow, costly and potentially error-strewn manual interventions. This incomplete approach would have also hampered our growth, so we chose to create a fully digital platform from the bottom up.

When did Advanzia’s transformation journey start?

We started in 2017 with the creation of a new core banking platform. This was the foundation for all our subsequent digitalisation efforts. Since then, we have created the omni-channel platform – that serves each of our European markets – and fully cloud-based native infrastructure and architecture. This move is part of a strong strategic effort that is sponsored by our management, and this support has enabled an “all or nothing” approach, rather than us picking and choosing from a fragmented list of digital projects.

How has this transformation changed the mindsets within your teams?

Advanzia’s infrastructure has been completely transformed, moving us away from data centres and servers to a serverless approach centred on the cloud. We use new technologies, apply different practices and have a completely different mindset to achieving business solutions. For example, we now define requirements as a script instead of making multiple manual changes. This enables us to be substantially more efficient, by focusing on what we need rather than how we intend to get there.

Infrastructure as Code is also referred to as “desired state configuration”, which is another way of thinking about this goal-oriented process. It used to be standard procedure to consider first of all “where do I click?” and “what app or firewall is right for us?” but now the insistence is turned to the needs of the user, with the system taking care of the technical details. The focus on “getting there” could be the main source of errors, as everyone took a different approach. With this new way of thinking, the system is consistent. From a cultural perspective, it can take time for the teams to adapt, but once people open their minds to working on the cloud and considering Infrastructure as Code, they do not want to return to ​the old ways.

What are the main advantages of switching to cloud-native technologies?

Going to cloud has been a huge business enabler in terms of usability, security and scalability. It has given us the ability to fail and recover much faster. In the past, we invested in firewalls, servers and data centres, and because these were big investments, we spent a lot of time designing the ideal solution. If you then need different requirements, you’re faced with substantial additional costs.

We now have more flexibility, and making architectural changes is a less critical step. The impact of change is also much lower, especially in terms of capital investment, and we can afford to change technology and suppliers without dramatic budgetary consequences. Upscaling and downscaling is made easy and cost-efficient, especially with the pandemic-related shift towards more e-commerce and fewer point-of-sale transactions.
Big architectural changes are now made without downtime for our platform. This is invaluable, as we are able to transform our processes without impacting our customers and the services we provide.

What role does Advanzia’s service provider network play in this transformation?

People with great skills – both internally and with our partners – are the core to this transformation. Advanzia’s system engineers have acquired the news skills necessary to become infrastructure developers. We’ve built one team with different skills, rather than creating different teams that hand over partially completed projects in various stages, and that get stuck in the usual silos.
At the same time, we knew we couldn’t assume that we would get it right on our own. We shared our digital roadmap with our service partners, who were able to challenge us and support us when needed. A service partner ecosystem that shares the same digital agenda and mindset is crucial.

What are the next steps for Advanzia’s digital transformation journey?

Now we have a solid foundation on which to build continued growth, we are better equipped to achieve speedier market entry and faster digital solution launch. A perfect example is this year’s market entry into Italy, which was launched from our cloud-based digital banking platform.
From a mindset perspective, our employees will want to continue working in this more efficient way. We are pleased that we took the decision to fully embrace the change and not approach it in a half-hearted fashion. Because once you start this journey, there is no way back.