HCLTech recently assisted one of South Africa’s largest financial services groups in a significant IT transformation project. Operating in 20 countries across Africa and other key markets worldwide, this client is Africa’s largest lender by assets. The project involved migrating their legacy systems to the SAP platform, a necessary step to modernise their aging IT ecosystem.
The client’s aging IT ecosystem required modernisation due to ongoing maintenance issues with their legacy systems. This transformation journey included migrating account information from the outdated systems to the new SAP platform. HCLTech was selected as the technology partner to lead this crucial migration initiative.
One significant challenge was the lack of control over the legacy tool managed by an external vendor. The vendor’s tool was costly, complex, and only allowed for the migration of one product at a time.
Additionally, changes to requirements had to go through a lengthy governance process, and each migration event required a new contract, resulting in higher lead times and costs.
The objective
HCLTech’s primary objective was to facilitate a seamless migration of accounts from the legacy core banking system to the new SAP platform.
The bank decided to implement the SAP Banking Services platform to replace their legacy system.
The goal was to develop and execute a simple, phased SAP migration strategy to overcome the identified challenges.
The solution
HCLTech recommended a product-agnostic technology solution that enabled the migration of multiple products simultaneously, eliminating the need for the external vendor’s tool.
This approach included enhancements that resulted in minimal development efforts for each subsequent migration.
Key benefits
The HCLTech solution provided several key benefits:
- Cost savings: The solution removed dependency on the external vendor for each migration event.
- Time savings: Being product-agnostic, the solution eliminated the need to scope migrations separately for each product, fast-tracking the entire migration journey.
- Easier decision making: By removing the product-type dependency, the bank could use different parameters to prioritise the migration to SAP Core Banking.
- Minimised customer disruption: A selective isolation strategy was used, targeting only impacted customers. They were notified in advance via SMS about the temporary outage of their self-service channels, allowing for faster migration with minimal disruption.
The impact
The measurable benefits of the migration program were substantial. The initial migration timeline was optimised from three weeks to one week, a 67% improvement.
By creating a simple migration process that removed the external vendor tool and relied on a phased, scalable in-house solution, the bank saved $15m.
Furthermore, 12m accounts were migrated based on priorities defined by the bank’s strategic initiative, demonstrating the effectiveness of HCLTech’s approach.
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