Bendigo and Adelaide Bank modernize core banking technology with Gen AI

INTRODUCTION

One of the most trusted brands in Australia

Bendigo and Adelaide Bank is Australia's most trusted bank, helping over 2.5 million customers to achieve their financial goals. Bendigo and Adelaide Bank’s vision is to be Australia’s bank of choice by feeding into the prosperity of customers and their communities.

Building on this commitment, the Bank’s profit-with-purpose Community Bank model—one of the largest social enterprise movements globally—is based on returning all profits directly to the local community that helps generate them.

Rated by independent market researcher Roy Morgan as one of Australia’s top 20 most trusted brands across all industries, the Bank has partnered with MongoDB to modernize by reducing complexity, moving to the cloud, and modernizing its core banking technology with the help of generative AI.

THE CHALLENGE

Thinking differently about using data

At the heart of its business and digital transformation is the drive to improve customer service and launch more convenient banking products. As a result, the Bank needed to think differently about how it worked with data, as its traditional, relational database management systems (RDBMS) with their inflexible schemas made it hard to develop new services. This meant simplifying its tech stack and doing things differently from the norm:

• Digital transformation by simplifying and consolidating the bank’s digital infrastructure, user interfaces, and processes
• Reducing complexity in the cloud and, eventually, leveraging the benefits of multi-cloud
• Empowering developers with tools to reduce development time and automate repetitive tasks with AI

“It has always been about making things simpler and easier for our customers,” said Ash Austin, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank’s Practice Lead for Infrastructure.

THE SOLUTION

Digital transformation on developers' terms

As a technological leader in the Australian financial services market, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank was eager to enable its developers to focus on more innovation so the bank could remain agile in a fast-moving market. That meant empowering teams with a streamlined and powerful tech stack on which to modernize and build improved apps and services.

Bendigo and Adelaide Bank first started working with MongoDB to support the team’s initial cloud-native APIs and microservices development across their tech stack and then simplify the user interfaces and processes for a consistent development experience. They chose MongoDB Atlas as the underlying platform for its tech stack because of the high levels of security and reliability offered by MongoDB Atlas, its ability to manage the bank’s real-time, operational data on a unified platform, and because of the intuitive developer experience offered by MongoDB’s document model, which maps to how developers think and code, enabling them to build applications faster.

Reducing complexity in the cloud

Key to the bank’s transformation is the need to reduce complexity for its developers and customers. This means simplifying and consolidating a sprawling tech stack. Bendigo and Adelaide Bank had a lot of duplicate systems and processes that had evolved over time and through many years of mergers and acquisitions. As the team worked to accelerate the transformation of the bank, for simplification and cloud centricity, MongoDB was the perfect choice as the leading modern, multi-cloud database platform. The benefits of the cloud are helping the bank's business systems by reducing disruption, improving velocity and consistency, and enhancing their risk and vulnerability management position.

After steadily ramping up its digital transformation work, in December 2020, the Bank kicked the project into high gear, successfully completing the migration of 32 of its banking applications to AWS in just 30 days.

Three-quarters of the “32 for 30” apps the bank needed to migrate to AWS were running on MongoDB. Using MongoDB’s migration tools, the team was able to move those apps seamlessly to AWS. The strong Terraform and API support within Atlas has been beneficial, making it really easy to integrate it with existing AWS infrastructure-as-code.

MongoDB’s capabilities, like native support for AWS PrivateLink, meant the team could create an enterprise tenancy where they’re not going across the public internet, providing dedicated access that ties into where their workloads are.

Empowering developers with the tools to reduce development time and automate repetitive tasks with AI

After successfully partnering with MongoDB, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank turned their attention to revamping some of their most critical customer-facing applications. Previously the bank had been unable to modernize these applications due to the complexity, knowledge, and high-touch manual effort required to migrate away from legacy relational databases. The use of generative AI helped change that.

In less than three months, the bank modernized its Agent Delivery System, a legacy retail banking application, on MongoDB Atlas with the help of MongoDB Relational Migrator and generative AI-assisted modernization tools. The Agent Delivery System is a retail teller application for the bank’s agent branches and is used in communities where digital banking functionality is made available from non-bank businesses, like newsagents or pharmacies. Prior to partnering with MongoDB, the bank ran the system on a legacy relational database that lacked the flexibility to easily evolve to reflect the complex data mapping requirements that today’s modern applications demand. Because of these database-related challenges, the bank’s analysts and developers were committing significant effort to complex database management tasks in order to keep the application running.

To do so, the bank decided to modernize its Agent Delivery System to make it easier for its developers to work with data and create innovative, accessible banking services. Specifically, the bank sought to adopt a new microservices architecture to help integrate its data and a robust API ecosystem—a series of connective mechanisms that enable easy data exchange—to facilitate fast, easy data flow between the bank’s applications, third parties, and consumers.

To migrate the Agent Delivery System to MongoDB Atlas, the bank deployed MongoDB Relational Migrator—a tool that helps customers eliminate barriers like time, cost, and risk frequently associated with application modernization—to expedite codebase analysis, service decomposition, and application refactoring, ensuring a secure and efficient migration. MongoDB Professional Services worked with Bendigo and Adelaide Bank to create customizable generative AI tooling, including scripts and prompts tailored for the bank’s unique tech stack, which accelerated the modernization process by automating integration testing and code generation for seamless deployment of the new Agent Delivery System’s microservices architecture. Legacy migrations can otherwise be long, expensive processes, but these solutions enabled Bendigo and Adelaide Bank to complete the migration with 90% less human effort and at one-tenth of the cost of a traditional legacy migration.

With this migration, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank eliminated volumes of routine code writing and programming work with automated generative AI tooling, which has empowered the bank’s developers to innovate with increased agility and more quickly deploy highly available and performant application features that enhance end-user experiences.

THE RESULTS

Minimizing Risk and Reducing Complexity

While the pace of transformation continues across Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, the team remains focused on transforming the business for the future as it strives to deliver on its vision to be Australia’s bank of choice. With the help of MongoDB’s continued partnership, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank has modernized their most critical applications, and next, intend to tackle a number of other outdated legacy applications across the bank, putting them on track to meet their target of 50% of critical workloads in the cloud by the end of 2024.

During the initiative, the bank:

• Reduced the development time required to migrate a core banking application from a legacy relational database to MongoDB Atlas by up to 90%.
• Migrated onto MongoDB Atlas at one-tenth of the cost of a traditional legacy-to-cloud migration.
• Automated repetitive developer tasks with new AI tooling in order to accelerate developers’ pace of innovation. For example, AI-powered automation reduced the time spent running application test cases from over 80 hours to just five minutes.