Business Requirement:
Fibabanka has wanted to modernize its existent pricing solution. They aimed to achieve a trackable, agile and flexible infrastructure solution that may be managed by business units in a self-service way with modernization.
Transformation
As a result of transformation provided by IBM together with ODM product and JFORCE consultancy, IT dependancy of Fibabanka has disappeared and a customizable product infrastructure that may provide immediate response to market demands has emerged.
Project Achievements
Agility
IT dependency has disappeared and business units now can work in a self-service way.
Simulation
Reflection of price and rate changes can now be measured real-time.
Time Saving
IT can now focus on value-added projects by being freed of routine work.
“We have been using existing System manually and complicatedly. Our work has become easier and faster after project, it has lowered our likelihood to make mistakes, saved us from manual operation and time."
Ayça Ayseven, Fibabanka Deposit and Investment Product Manager
Fibabanka which has joined Fiba Group in 2010 has been rendering service to customers with its “We understand fast, we solve fast” mission and personal customer care understanding. Fibabanka having 60 branches and 1.5 million clients recently; has been continuously improving its products, services and services in order to be favorite bank of Turkey with its digitalization vision, understanding of being everyone’s bank and goals of creating happy employees and happy clients.
In line with these goals, Fibabanka decided to renew its existing system for providing more custom solutions to clients and creating more agile processes and quickly started to work for that vision. There was a structure managed by various parameter tables and owned by IT in the existing System. Within the scope of agile corporations concept; there was a clear need of changing demands of business units without operating them in any IT line. Fibabanka was seeking to modernize existing pricing solution by making its system dynamic, faster to update and manageable by business units. Accordingly, a project partnership with IBM Partner JFORCE has been initiated for easy to use and quickly adaptable solution.
During decision making processes held between Fibabanka and JFORCE, using IBM Operational Decision Manager (ODM) solution of IBM’s Cloud Pak for Automation Product Family has been decided. As a result of mastery of Fibabanka in their own system and expertise of JFORCE in IBM product, a quick integration phase has been completed. Thanks to modernized dynamic pricing engine in the end of the process; while Fibabanka could provide more customized experiences and products to its customers, business units started to manage entire transactions in a self-service way independent from IT and business operations become more agile.
Which Demands Led to the Need of Such Project?
In the existing banking system of Fiba Holding, pricing needs were carried out by pricing module developed internally by IT. It was an application managed by information Technologies because it is old and its screens cannot be used by business units. This consequently was creating problems during the transactions. Business units were needing to make many changes on prices and rates during the periods when market is volatile and these changes were made by creating tickets to IT. This was causing both dependency to IT and operations to become slower. In addition to that, features waiting to be developed for a long time such as test, simulation and regression were not present in the previous system.
Additionally, having a dynamic pricing module became an important need with Fibabanka’s growth strategy and focus for retail banking. In line with these needs, Fibabanka started to seek a new product.
Selecting Both Right Consultant and Right Solution is Equally Important for a Successful Project!
Fibabanka Information Technologies and Architecture Team Manager Korhan Kocabıyık shares his opinion about the project phase; “It was very important for us getting regular, seamless and swift answers from the project for performance and correct pricing issues. JFORCE reassured us for those topics with its experience and won us around from the first meeting. We may get very detailed, customer-specific pricing with our own application. Products providing dynamic pricing are usually having difficulties to get such levels. Since we have not wanted to lose that feature, we have made long meetings with JFORCE on how can we do that. They have suggested great solutions and we have made a relatively long PoC process. We have observed that together with IBM products, JFORCE could very quickly deliver designed solution, we have also rapidly advanced in integration. PoC period was very successful and therefore decision process became faster. We have decided to continue with IBM Operational Decision Manager (ODM) solution from IBM’s Cloud Pak for Automation product family. We have had extensive control on application since we have coded it and JFORCE had a great expertise in IBM ODM product. This was also very important for us. Product capabilities have always primary importance during a project, however outcome is generally not so successful if you cannot integrate that product. Therefore, JFORCE’s product expertise and responses to our questions and demands perfectly suit us and we have had a rapid project initiation phase.”
“We got along well with JFORCE team, wanted them to visit us many times and requested a lot of changes. This was probably a little bit tiring for them but in the end we have had a great project. They have great expertise in product features. We wanted to keep some features of the application we coded. Those were challenging moments but JFORCE team generated quick solutions. That’s why I recommend JFORCE and I strongly believe that they will have other successful projects with other companies.”
Korhan Kocabıyık, Fibabanka Information Technologies Software and Architecture Team Manager
Pricing Limitation of 9 Breakdowns Became “Unlimited”!
Since previous pricing module was dependent on database tables pricing could be made with maximum 9 criteria and this was preventing business unit when they wanted to create more detailed pricing for products and transactions. This limitation has disappeared with new system; it has become a system that can be used by business units through parameters such as customer, credit, deposit features or parameters that can be fed with external services. IT dependency has come to an end; project has been transferred to business units section by section with trainings. Test and simulation features missing on previous system have also been introduced. In the previous system, business unit could not see how is the effect on which segment when they changed the pricing. Testing that, re-simulating that on previous transactions and full regression tests were the other gains of the project.
Our Goal as Fibabanka is Providing Tailor-Made Service by Evaluating Interactions of our Customers!
Korhan Kocabıyık: “We may think of that as a start for other projects we will complete. We not only have a rule engine can be used for dynamic pricing but also a solution that may produce rapid results by running entire business rules. In the upcoming days, we consider to start new products for getting flow rules of business processes and approval system rules from ODM product. We are now using different product for point scoring system while granting loan to customers, we will be evaluating to replace ith with another product having adequate potential. We have a great data transformation project in parallel and it will put into use in summer of 2020. Organizational structure in bank is also changing; we will separate data warehouse team from IT and form data team. Entire data of the bank will be processed there with data scientists and we will have very valuable output from those data, we want to use them in dynamic pricing. Afterwards our mobile internet banking will be renewed. Customer clicking a button on internet banking will also affect pricing. We will integrate it to completed and upcoming projects. We are also very curious about features of ODM product’s own map, we will try to use them as much as possible. In fact, we want to be the first bank to use them in Turkey.”
“Our Goal as JFORCE is Bringing Innovation to Banking Sector with AI Technologies”
JFORCE putting its signature on a successful project by ODM integration completed with Fibabanka aims to provide innovation and speed to banking sector. JFORCE Software and Business Development Director Ümit Sile mentioned about the details of project they have completed with Fibabanka: “We have been working with banking sector many years and providing services such as business process management and integration solutions by especially using middleware technologies. One of the biggest project we have completed was with Eximbank. We have analyzed fifty-five banking process in shorter than two years with BPM Platform of IBM. In fact we have renewed entire Eximbank banking infrastructure. Besides, we have been working with various IBM solutions for especially supporting API economy and delivering services for integration projects. Datapower Security Gateway in particular is a preferred product. We have been providing solutions for securing externally facing services, protecting them against cyber-attacks and creating certain standards for in-house integrations. Our goal in last two years is providing innovation to banking sector by using business rules and artificial intelligence technologies. Fibabanka project was the first one in this direction. Our goal is creating new experiences for customer by using algorithms such as machine learning and combining them together with business rules.