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Customer Story

BNG Bank Creates State-of-The-Art Platform for Interactive Services

Dutch bank optimizes application development and deployment process to serve customers faster, better and more efficiently while saving costs

Related services
Azure Cloud, DevOps

Industry
Finance

BNG Bank provides financial services to local authorities and public sector institutions in the Netherlands. With a customer base that includes municipalities, regional authorities, and institutions in the domains of healthcare, education, energy and infrastructure, BNG Bank is involved in financing a wide range of projects that benefit society. Although the bank has a relatively small staff of some 300 employees, its impact on public services and the Dutch infrastructure is substantial.

Why
Improve service by optimizing the application development and deployment process
What
Create a state-of-the-art platform for interactive services
How
Advise, coach, and assist the bank's application development team in the transition to an Azure DevOps-based cloud platform

Innovative Service Solution

BNG Bank wanted to increase its online presence, become a smart leader and improve its service offering to its public sector clients by optimizing its application development and deployment process. Meanwhile, the bank continued to face challenging compliance requirements: in addition to the European Central Bank’s strict regime, new regulations are issued with increasing frequency and have to be implemented within a shorter timeframe. Because the ECB makes no distinction concerning a bank’s size, the frequent changes create considerable challenges for the bank’s small IT department.

Logical Yet Challenging Step


“We wanted a state-of-the-art, interactive platform,” explained Martin Kuijper, manager of BNG Bank's IT department. That meant the platform needed easily accessible services, faster service provision and flexible capacity expansion. At the same time, BNG wanted to make its teams less dependent on its third-party service provider.

“We'd heard of Xebia's successes at another bank, so we approached them in 2018,” added Andre van der Tol, head of BNG Bank's application development department. “Xebia's wealth of knowledge and experience soon became apparent and their consultants helped us make the right choices,” he explained. Xebia also advised organizational improvements and offered ready-to-use DevOps templates, which had proven performance. “Xebia's support gave us confidence, which made us more productive,” said Van der Tol.

“Azure DevOps has reduced the lead time of releases and deployments from an average of four days to a matter of hours. Moreover, the transition and the cloud’s flexible architecture and pay-per-use model achieved substantial cost savings for us.”
BNG_Bank_logo
Martin Kuijper Manager of BNG Bank’s IT Department

Safe and Smooth Transition

Andre van der Tol praised the transition, “Xebia successfully advised, coached and assisted us during the bank’s transition. Xebia also addressed our security-related concerns, organizing workshops to create transparency about the transition and the new processes. Under Xebia’s guidance, we’ve been able to radically reduce our testing effort because the checks have been designed and included in the workflow in advance. There’s hardly any unexpected outcomes, and because the testing process is automated, it follows a standardized set of steps that are repeatable and predictable.” Kuijper added: “Azure DevOps has reduced the lead time of releases and deployments from an average of four days to a matter of hours. And if any incidents do occur, we improve and move forward instead of rolling back.”

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