Bankdata is one of Denmark’s largest financial IT specialists. The company is owned and shared by eight Danish banks, through which its digital products reach almost a third of the country’s banking customers, thousands of bank employees, and approximately 200,000 business clients.
The company has built leading financial systems and functionality since it was founded in 1966. In the following decades, Denmark has continuously evolved to become one of the most digitally advanced and well-connected societies in the world. As a result, citizens, businesses and all banking customers have very high digital banking experience expectations.
To ensure it can continuously exceed those expectations, Bankdata recently embarked on its own modernization journey, and partnered with Thoughtworks to bring its vision for smarter ways of working and a future-ready technology foundation to life.
Laying a new foundation for digital banking transformation
With a deep understanding of what it takes to successfully transform and modernize an organization, Bankdata created its own Unified Technology Strategy (UTS) that laid out a path to faster, more agile operation and a more flexible and cost-efficient digital foundation.
This gave us a clear view of what Bankdata wanted to achieve, and an understanding of the principles it wanted to shape its newly modernized business and operations around.
Bringing Bankdata’s new technology strategy to life
Our experts started by working closely with Bankdata’s teams to evaluate the current state of their operations and on-premises technology foundation. This included conducting group workshops and face-to-face interviews which helped us understand the key challenges across the company’s legacy technology landscape — availability, performance, costs, and customer experience.
This enabled us to define a clear vision for the future of Bankdata’s technology landscape, and start building a high-level plan to achieve that vision over the coming years. At the core of this vision was a plan to evolve Bankdata’s core mainframe system, which had been in place for over 60 years. By shifting it into the cloud, Bankdata’s experts could more easily evolve and iterate on it as the company’s needs change.
Together with the company’s teams, we defined a set of 10 principles for the whole organization that would help embed the engineering and transformation mindsets required to make this new vision a reality. We also defined a roadmap of key initiatives — named “accelerators” — that would help drive progress towards the new technology vision. Each accelerator represented a smaller technological or operational transformation, enabling iterative progress towards broader transformation to generate ROI as quickly as possible.
Finally, we devised and recommended a lightweight technical governance model to guide teams in using these accelerators, and ensure that the newly defined technical principles were upheld across all of Bankdata’s operations.
Our tech strategy has already strengthened commitment from our member banks and reinforced our position as their trusted technology partner. Collaborating with Thoughtworks, we have established a clear vision for Bankdata as a leading tech company. This enables us to address complex dilemmas—both strategic and operational—while accelerating our technological adaptability and creating business value in a critical and highly regulated industry. By initiating our shift to a cloud-based infrastructure, we’ve embarked on a transformative journey—one that’s as much more about cultural and organisational evolution as it is about technology. This roadmap positions us to tackle the challenges faced by all tech companies and to provide reliable and scalable digital solutions to millions of banking customers.
Enabling better digital banking experiences for everyone
With a clear, actionable, and well-governed modernization roadmap, Bankdata is now ready to begin making iterative changes that will soon help the company:
Improve system availability and the reliability of the solutions its banks deliver to their customers.
Deliver greater cost efficiencies and redirect resources towards innovation and the development of new capabilities.
Build enhanced online functionality for its customers, and keep up with their ever-increasing digital banking experience demands.
Currently, Bankdata is rolling its new vision, principles, and technical governance model out across the organization. Once that is complete, the team can begin work on the first accelerator project and kickstart their modernization journey.
Bankdata had a clear idea of what it wanted to achieve through modernization, so our focus was on finding the best ways of enabling that change, planning out a clear evolutionary roadmap, and building in governance to ensure this change is adopted in the right ways right ways across the company.
