Case study

When an outage left banking customers unable to use cards or withdraw cash, industry regulators embarked on an audit of critical business processes across all UK banks. Our client, a major UK retail bank, initiated a program of work to address the excessive use of high-risk manual intervention during the build of application code from development to production.

The bank’s critical legacy platform was based on ageing technologies (IBM Middleware) upon which they had evolved complex, undocumented, solutions. IT changes to the platform had become time-consuming, manually intensive and costly. Consequently, the bank had complex systems requiring high-risk alterations that required expensive specialist support to unravel a decade of interwoven application dependencies.

Icon commenced an ‘Automation’ project, drawing upon proven vision, leadership, program management and delivery capabilities. Our considerable expertise in payments and system integration enabled a proposal that would both comply with audit requirements and progress the momentum of a full program of work.

As a key integration platform, central to the processing of several CAT-A & Cat-B applications, Icon designed a transitional delivery approach to enable the introduction of new methodologies in parallel with existing projects. Icon not only introduced Continuous Integration (CI) tooling and processes to an existing java-based application, but also incorporated the embedded commercial software suite into the same CI pattern.

By working in partnership with the bank’s teams, Icon consultants were able to share deep technical knowledge and ensure that staff were self-sufficient and empowered to take ownership of the business applications and the underpinning infrastructure.