ABN AMRO serves retail, private, and corporate banking clients with a focus on the Netherlands and selective operations internationally. Clients are offered a comprehensive and full range of products and services through omni-channel distribution, with a focus on advanced mobile applications and internet banking.
Creating Long-Term Stakeholder Value Begins with Information Management
A key focus for ABN AMRO is to be recognized as building sustainable client relationships by offering transparent and simple products, and to create long-term value for all its stakeholders (clients, shareholders, employees, and society as a whole). In order for the financial institution to do so, it must be capable of managing and processing information in the most expeditious manner possible.
The legacy information management systems ABN AMRO had in place led to various departments storing information differently. In order to deliver the high-level of service to its various stakeholders, it required a more effective, integrated, and intelligent approach for managing vital information assets residing within its various systems and repositories.
Inadequacies of Legacy Systems Drive Need for a Better Approach
ABN AMRO had multiple instances of the same legacy enterprise content management solution implemented in various departments throughout the firm, but these deployments were not connected. Furthermore, these deployments each had their own interfaces, metadata structures, and repositories.
“We had many challenges with our legacy information management solution. For one, the system’s architecture was unfriendly and difficult to integrate within our existing IT landscape. In addition, we didn’t see any real innovation in the vendor’s product roadmap. They were still talking about ‘content must reside within our solution in order to get value from our solution,’ and ‘documents serve as the only source of record.’ We’re moving away from these outdated approaches, and so is the market.”
We looked at some of the other legacy ECM solutions, but they couldn’t scale to handle the volume and variety of content we needed to manage. But perhaps even more importantly, they didn’t have the flexible and open architecture we were looking for. These solutions just didn’t fit into our scheme of things from an IT perspective.
Saswat Padhi, Program Manager of Document & Records Management/ECM.
Flexible + Connected + Modern Architecture = Nuxeo
“There were several important criteria we looked at. First, we wanted an adaptable platform with a flexible content services architecture that would enable us to easily build our own front end. It was also important to us that the vendor was on the leading edge when it came to leveraging modern and innovative technologies. The ideal solution would also enable us to ‘reuse and repurpose’ content as well as provide internal indexing to ensure a single source of truth. In addition, we very much wanted to move away from the ‘per user’ license model.”
With the help from Infosys, ABN AMRO’s strategic technology partner for nearly a decade, the bank selected and deployed Nuxeo to modernize its approach to document management and records management.
“Infosys played a key role in identifying the future landscape, helping us deploy the solution, and in taking care of ABN AMRO’s very specific needs.?
Infosys is a global leader in consulting, technology, outsourcing, and next-generation services that helps enterprises around the globe stay a step ahead of emerging business trends and outperform the competition.
The Nuxeo Content Services Platform is remarkably adaptable. Configuring our own front-end was quite easy, and we can also integrate Nuxeo with pretty much any external component. Plus, Nuxeo comes pre-integrated with Elasticsearch, and this was one of the key factors that led us to select the platform. Also, the fact the Nuxeo supports NoSQL for scaling up for high-volume scenarios was very appealing to us,
noted Padhi.
Optimizing and Improving Records Management and Client Onboarding
ABN AMRO utilizes a “hot and cold records” archival paradigm for managing millions of emails, faxes, and other files within its information management ecosystem. The bank uses Nuxeo for storing and managing the most actively-used and accessed “hot records,” which include client onboarding files like agreements, contracts, customer interactions, and other important documentation.
Nuxeo is part of a strategic architecture that also includes Elasticsearch for federated search over “hot,” “cold,” and legacy systems, which consists of a NoSQL repository for managing “hot” or frequently accessed information, and Hortonworks for archiving “cold” or infrequently accessed information. There are approximately 10,000 internal ABN AMRO employees currently using this system, and the company expects upwards of 24,000 total internal users to eventually be served by the complete solution.
We had multiple disconnected ECM deployments within the company, all with different user interfaces and metadata structures. As you can imagine, this makes finding the single source of truth very difficult. With Nuxeo, we’re now able to harmonize our information management landscape, which is incredibly valuable because it enables us to better manage and utilize information for a better customer experience, as well as make better use of our internal IT systems and reduce costs. Furthermore, Nuxeo is also helping us in our GDPR compliance efforts.
ABN AMRO Looks to Expand Use of Nuxeo Platform
“We’re still working to connect some of our other information silos, which is common for even the most modernized banks. With Nuxeo, we’ve made very good progress on this front. We’re in discussions with many of our business units about connectors for linking together many of our other existing core business applications. We also want to utilize Nuxeo for managing voice, chat, audio, and other rich media content, which we know is something they’re very good at.”
ABN AMRO intends to move completely off of its legacy ECM deployments within its various departments, but with Nuxeo, the bank can do so at a pace that best suits its needs and requirements. With the ability to connect and integrate Nuxeo with its existing solutions – including the legacy systems the bank will eventually transition away from – ABN AMRO can manage content “in place” (where information assets already reside within existing systems and repositories) via a centralized hub. The company expects to manage around one billion assets with Nuxeo Platform within the next 1-3 years.