How Delen Private Bank NV tackled legacy technology and increased efficiency through process orchestration

Delen Private Bank NV specializes in responsible, sustainable wealth management for private customers throughout Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Switzerland and the UK. For decades the bank has been developing its own IT solutions in-house to ensure that they are perfectly tailored to the needs of both their customers and the bank itself. That level of independence also enables a very efficient change management practice. This IT-driven focus has also made the bank a clear digital leader in the private banking industry. To design and deploy more efficient, automated workflows that enable the entire organization to scale and adapt, Delen Private Bank leveraged process orchestration powered by Camunda for some of its processes.

The Challenge: Addressing the limitations of legacy technology

To maintain its leading position, the bank remains eager to adapt to change. As Delen Private Bank NV continues to grow and expand geographically, the organization looked to address some specific challenges, such as:

• Aging legacy technology centered on COBOL that is less appealing to new developers.
• An aging code-base where code is co-mingled with business processes, making it difficult for developers to navigate and troubleshoot specific challenges.
• Maintaining workflows consistently across branches while adhering to local regulations.
• Transferring knowledge between employees who are nearing retirement and the new generation of employees that recently joined the bank.

The Solution: Moving to a services architecture powered by Camunda

Delen Private Bank’s IT team wanted a new, structured way of working, one that would allow for better, more strategic collaboration opportunities with business end users; would create a more flexible, adaptable platform so developers could efficiently make workflow adjustments; would allow for more consistency and efficiency across branches and regions; and would increase the amount of automation across several key workflows to enhance efficiency and performance.

The team decided to migrate to a services architecture built upon Camunda to further harness the benefits of BPMN as a shared visual language, as well as a powerful workflow engine and flexible workflow automation tools to scale process improvements.

When choosing Camunda and process orchestration, Delen Private Bank wanted to create a system where it would be easy to follow up on process instances – where a developer could easily visualize where there is an error or opportunity for improvement in a process. This type of flexibility has been critically important in keeping up with banking regulatory changes, such as T+1 requirements.

“With T+1, it was easy. We just needed to make a few little changes to our workflows and code changes became easier due to the business logic being in the workflow,” explained Kris De Ridder, Application Architect for Delen Private Bank.

With Camunda and process orchestration, Delen Private Bank is now able to transform time- and labor-intensive manual processes into semi- or fully automated workflows to increase efficiency and free up knowledge workers to respond to cases that require human intervention. A great example is the bank’s settlements workflow.

Use Case in Point: Automating the settlements workflow

As the IT team started their major migration project, they were approached by the business team with a request to find a solution to improve their settlement workflow. After reviewing the challenges in the existing process, the team decided to automate the process with Camunda. Here’s what the process looked like prior to implementing process orchestration with Camunda:

• Each settlement process instance goes through multiple status changes per day, spanning several days.
• The settlement flow possible has several manual status changes.
• The system printed out external messages containing data to interpret the status changes so that the team member could compare what was printed on paper to what was in the COBOL-managed system.
• The entire team handling this highly manual process consisted of 2-3 individuals; even when they were working at full strength, the process was slow and arduous.

The IT team took advantage of decision tables in Camunda to denote status changes and to identify what changes trigger which workflow actions, greatly reducing the amount of manual intervention needed during those multiple status changes. They also incorporated a front-end system for the business users to easily visualize where each process instance was, and what (if any) activity or intervention was required.

The Results: Increased visibility and efficiency deliver time and resource savings to the whole business

Since implementing Camunda into the settlements flow, the 2–3-person team handling settlements can work much more efficiently, reserving their time to handle exceptions and high-needs cases where human intervention is actually needed. Instead of working with inefficient and wasteful paper, things happen digitally, right from the employee’s dashboard.

“It doesn’t even feel like they’re working within a system or completing a system task. It just feels intuitive,” confirmed Gerrie Schenck, Developer.

The success found in the settlements workflow echoes the benefits that De Ridder and the IT department have felt since implementing Camunda. Where before they were inhibited by complexity, regulatory requirements that increase risk exposure, and aging technology that made work harder, now the team realizes greater efficiency through:

• Flexibility to meet regulatory changes – those changes are constant now, as opposed to requiring an arduous “find and fix” exercise across multiple state machines.
• Better human resource allocation by automating processes – employees have more time for “smarter tasks.”
• Greater IT efficiency – it’s faster and easier to find and fix production incident since there is a visual view of process through BPMN.
• Improved IT resource allocation – a faster, more efficient deployment process frees up developers to work on new projects that deliver greater value to the business.
• Alignment across bank branches and geographic regions – all the different offices are aligned and working in the same way with the automated workflow improvements.

What’s Next: Expanding the Camunda platform and exploring Camunda 8

Aside from the settlements workflow, there are currently 20 different processes running on the Camunda-supported platform, supporting three different teams. To expand on these initial successes, the IT team is now focusing on bringing their core data into the platform and has a team currently making an inventory of all existing business processes at Delen Private Bank. From there, they will make a prioritized migration list and begin moving those processes from COBOL to Camunda.

Additionally, there is now a user group representing the three teams currently using Camunda that meets every two weeks to share knowledge and troubleshoot any new problems in their Camunda-run processes. This group represents a community of practice and fields questions from multiple teams within the bank investigating whether Camunda would be a good fit for their processes. In fact, this group put together an internal roadshow to demonstrate the value of Camunda and its potential for further transforming Delen Private Bank’s business operations through process orchestration.

The group is currently evaluating whether it would be a good practice to create a centralized team to define next projects and support delivery teams in projects moving forward.

This group is also strategizing about how to thoughtfully approach and implement Camunda 8 into their plans.