Commercial banking giant ensures customer-facing apps deliver outstanding UX with OpenText™ Professional Services and OpenText™ Enterprise Performance Engineering

About the bank

This European commercial bank serves more than 15 million personal and corporate customers, providing core transaction services, loans and mortgages, and a full range of banking products.

Customer accounts:

15 million
Employees:

75,000
Total assets:

More than €800 billion

Summary

Challenges

Customer-facing apps suffered from poor performance.
Testing failed to identify points of failure.
Bank struggled to attract and retain customers.

Solution

Looked for new ways to work.
Built a test scenario catalog.
Created a positive partnership.

Results

Delivered 40% greater test capability
Caught 61 production incidents in one year
Reduced carbon footprint

Challenges

Customer-facing apps offered poor performance
Testing failed to identify points of failure; remediation was slow
Bank struggled to attract customers

Today’s banking customers depend on much more than the physical branch: mobile and web channels now dominate the customer experience. As a result, application downtime, visual inconsistency, lack of functionality, and poor performance could lead to lost opportunities, with customers able to switch to competitors with the swipe of a screen.

For one large bank in Europe, continuous app enhancement and innovation is key, with new features and services regularly added to help keep it ahead of the pack. However, in some cases the bank found that applications were not performing well. For example, as new services grew in popularity and the transactional throughput increased, the bank found that unexpected processing bottlenecks caused a slow, laggy user experience, or generated production incidents.

As a priority, the bank looked to ensure that its applications would always be available, and defined performance criteria that would deliver an outstanding customer experience. The bank also recognized that its applications would need to be redesigned with scalable capacity in mind, to handle highly variable peak workloads.

For example, the bank manages government bond sales, and on launch day investor demand spirals upwards in a matter of seconds. In the past, the bank coped with the peak workloads by massively over-allocating computing resources, which during normal operations were then under-utilized. If the bank could identify and resolve application issues more effectively, then it could run a leaner IT infrastructure and significantly reduce operational expenses. In addition, running applications more efficiently would cut the server footprint and decrease the bank’s carbon footprint, potentially making an important contribution to corporate sustainability targets.

A spokesperson for the bank said, “Our internal testing efforts struggled to keep pace with all this new development activity, and expanding the internal team to acquire the necessary capacity and skills would have exceeded our limited budget. We knew that improved testing could help drive application performance, reduce costs, and enhance the customer experience, so we looked for possible solutions.”

As a result of the OpenText solution, our internet banking applications consistently achieve 70% pass rates.

Spokesperson
Leading European bank

Solution

The bank worked with OpenText Professional Services to set up a software testing services catalog. The solution executes testing on OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering, deployed on-premises at the bank.

Products deployed

OpenText™ Enterprise Performance Engineering

Performance testing software that lets development teams across the globe share load testing resources

Services provided

OpenText™ Professional Services

Leverage a team of certified OpenText consultants with more than 25 years of experience with the highest possible level of services

Looking for a new way of working

The bank turned to its long-term IT partner, OpenText, to consider testing approaches that would deliver improved application performance and customer experience while meeting budget objectives.

OpenText proposed a hybrid model, with the internal team able to expand its testing capacity and capability when needed and then scale back to a reduced level during periods of lower demand. This partnership also allows the bank to access deep skills within OpenText – covering databases, operating systems, servers, and more.

Building a test catalog

To meet the bank’s budget constraints, OpenText moved away from the traditional time-and-materials contract and created a fixed-price testing services catalog. For each testing type – such as web, mobile, and API – the bank can choose pre-set parameters for volume, peak load, or any standardized dimension. The catalog not only allows the bank to see and plan its testing costs based on pre-defined pricing, but it also makes testing a straightforward, industrialized process. The testing itself runs on OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering software, deployed on-premises at the bank. OpenText Professional Services can also offer the catalog service using OpenText™ Professional Performance Engineering (LoadRunner Professional) and/or OpenText™ Core Performance Engineering (LoadRunner Cloud). Any of the OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering (LoadRunner) solutions can also be provided as SaaS versions running on the OpenText Cloud.

To build the test-scenario catalog, the bank and OpenText worked closely to identify the key areas where improvements would lead to maximum gains. When the project was fully clarified, the combined team defined the service levels, worked on a service-ticket workflow, designed the catalog test descriptions and scope, and set out the governance procedures.

Creating a positive partnership

The partnership with OpenText not only enables access to a far greater range and capacity for testing, but it also provides a governance component to help the bank develop its operational model, with external expertise available to support critical services.

For example, OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering can generate more realistic application transaction loads, and use the results to help design higher-quality code. In addition, easy access to the catalog has created a clear connection between testing, business performance, and the customer experience.

During the catalog’s first operational year, we avoided 61 production incidents. Any one of these could have impacted millions of users, causing considerable financial and reputational damage.

Spokesperson
Leading European bank

Results

The OpenText solution is helping the bank test software faster and earlier in the lifecycle, for higher quality at lower cost. As well as helping avoid problems in production, the solution offers greater efficiency and reduces the bank’s carbon footprint.

Delivered 40% greater test capability

Following the introduction of the testing services catalog on OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering, the bank achieved around 1,700 completed tests in a year, a 40 percent increase. Similarly, the total number of test scripts grew by more than 25 percent, and these scripts can be reused in multiple tests. The results generated by such a comprehensive program are used to improve code quality, while every failed test contributes to performance visibility, bug fixes, and release decisions.

The simplicity of the catalog of pre-built test scenarios also encourages earlier testing, using the ‘shift-left’ approach to produce higher-quality code prior to production rollout. The spokesperson said, “As a result of the OpenText solution, our internet banking applications consistently achieve 70% pass rates. The stability of our software demonstrates that the bank is establishing a mature software development and testing model.”

Caught 61 critical incidents

Prior to the introduction of the OpenText testing services catalog on OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering, developer teams tended to create their testing plans only after applications were complete, waiting until that point in time before asking the performance team for budget estimates and timings.

With the testing services catalog showing fixed prices for well-defined test scopes, the development planners can now include testing as part of the business case, reducing budget uncertainty and increasing code quality. “During the catalog’s first operational year, we avoided 61 production incidents,” said the spokesperson. “Any one of these could have impacted millions of users, causing considerable financial and reputational damage.”

Reduced carbon footprint

As the bank continues to streamline its applications, it no longer needs to over-provision system resources to ensure high performance. Instead, the bank can tailor its IT infrastructure to meet precise needs, cut energy consumption, and reduce its carbon footprint, all of which contribute both financially and in terms of corporate social responsibility.

The new testing services catalog approach, designed in partnership with OpenText and running on OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering, is producing immediate beneficial results. “In a world where customer experience is king and sustainable operations are expected as a baseline, the bank is now well-positioned to develop and run applications effectively and efficiently,” said the spokesperson.