How Ekspress bank uses IT-Performance to drive digital transformation
Ekspres bank drives digital transformation while delivering outstanding performance and customer experience with Appdynamics and Ymor, part of Sentia
Ekspres Bank – part of BNP Paribas is a fast-growing Danish bank with a business that relies heavily on a smooth user experience. They turned to Ymor to gain valuable IT performance insights that enable them to focus their resources.
How to reach the highest service level
The objective for a company such as Ekspres Bank is to offer customers a fast, credible and easy service in order to make the decision process quick and reliable. The bank uses both strategic business partners and brokers as well as direct sales in order to provide loans for private consumers. Sometimes it is a matter of minutes whether the consumer accepts a loan or rejects the idea all together because the process takes too long.Head of IT Operations, Greg Parker, explains the challenges: “From time to time we could see that our applications did not perform quite as well as they should. You have to remember that our system workflow is very complex, incorporating many third-party dependencies as well as different technologies. Traditional monitoring is not always sufficient to determine transaction performance and to pinpoint specific bottlenecks.”
— Greg Parker, Hoofd IT Operations
In other words, the IT-staff at Ekspres Bank could maybe register a decline in systems performance, but it would take up too many resources to determine exactly what was wrong and how the performance could be restored. “We couldn’t get the information in sufficient detail and fast enough. In our line of business, this means losing customers who take their bank business elsewhere.”
Transformed IT operations
‘Transparency, certainty and the best use of your valuable time for development and operations’. This promise sounded tempting and in late 2015 the IT-team of Ekspres Bank got in touch with Ymor (back then called Avenida) to discuss the advantages of application performance management (APM).
The advanced monitoring solution views the whole system as it should be done: from the point of view of the customer (or end-user). It can zoom all the way down to the specific code level and pinpoint exactly where the application takes a little bit too long and therefore slows down the process.
“The value that this solution has added to the Ekspres Bank business, has made it a trusted solution at management level. It has given the bank confidence that we know what is happening in our application workflow,” says Greg Parker, Head of IT Operations. “We can now prove if a third-party web service is affecting our performance. We can drill down into the specific component method that is causing an issue in a complex workflow, containing many components and methods. In short, we have control where once we were somewhat blind. “We use the dashboard for real-time monitoring and the system provides a daily health statistics report of the most important key information points,” explains Greg Parker. “This report allows us to perform ongoing capacity management for the application workflow components, as it provides a daily benchmarking overview of the application. At the same time, potential bottlenecks in production are identified on a very detailed level in order for us to allocate resources in the most efficient manner.” Further, the automated alert function is valuable for a company where time – in the most literal sense of the word – is money. “I was on the train coming back from a meeting in Jutland when I received a notification on my phone that the RKI- service wasn’t working properly and I could direct a technician towards the problem right away.”
— Greg Parker, Hoofd IT Operations
Benefits for both bank and customers
In short, the application performance management services have provided Ekspres bank with a chance to allocate resources much more efficiently. It has helped to give the customer a more smooth, quick and reliable experience when applying for a loan. The improved application performance, enables Ekspres Bank to further develop the business and at the same time keep a keen eye on IT-costs.
“The application performance management solution is valuable for us because it gives us the freedom to focus on business development, innovation and user experience instead of troublesome fault finding. It has proven itself as a great management tool and a sound investment,” concludes Greg Parker, Head of IT Operations at Ekspres Bank.
— Greg Parker, Hoofd IT Operations
Key benefits:
- Mean time to resolution (MTTR) cut in half
- Unified monitoring ensures optimum performance for best customer experience
- Easy-to-use interface that multiple teams can leverage, including development and operations
Expres Bank uses the Ymonitor Platform (modules Automatic Root Cause Analysis and Real User Monitoring)
Contact our experts!
More about this topic? Contact our experts to find out!
