Lombard Odier modernizes legacy banking technology with Gen AI

INTRODUCTION

Centuries-old private bank rethinks technology infrastructure

Founded in 1796, Lombard Odier is a private Swiss bank with USD 354 billion of client assets. The bank now has 28 offices worldwide that offer custom banking services to entrepreneurs, executives, and high-net-worth individuals through its in-house global wealth management platform. In addition, Lombard Odier provides a shared technology platform to partner institutions in Switzerland, continental Europe, the UK, and Singapore so they can benefit from the bank’s experience and economies of scale.

Driven-by its long-standing commitment to innovation, and to stay abreast of ever-evolving customer needs, Lombard Odier partnered with MongoDB to accelerate the modernization of its systems with generative AI (gen AI). By migrating its applications to advanced technologies such as MongoDB, Lombard Odier has been able to reduce technical complexity and accelerate its innovation.

THE CHALLENGE

Keeping pace with the industry and digital innovation

Delivering seamless digital experiences to both private and institutional customers—while driving cost efficiencies—is a priority for every organization in the financial industry. With the acceleration of digitalization and the advent of AI, Lombard Odier decided to evolve its systems by integrating new technologies, enabling its clients to benefit from the best possible service and experience.

In 2020 the bank launched its GX Program, a seven-year initiative designed at modernizing its banking application architecture which was developed in house, and which would enable Lombard Odier to respond rapidly to market developments.

To innovate quickly, reduce service disruption, and improve the customer experience, Lombard Odier wanted this large-scale transformation initiative to be applied coherently and consistently across the organization. To achieve this, the bank's Technology and Operations leadership team set out to find a cloud-agnostic database platform with AI capabilities.

THE SOLUTION

Leveraging MongoDB AI Modernization Solutions

Building on a 10-year relationship with MongoDB, Lombard Odier chose the developer data platform provider for its transformation. After discussing the bank's initiative, MongoDB recommended leveraging MongoDB's modernization services, which combines advanced gen AI tools and MongoDB expertise to accelerate the application modernization process. Fabrice Bidard, Head of Technical Architecture at Lombard Odier, noted that "it became apparent that using a combination of gen AI and MongoDB's modernization services could help automate time-consuming tasks, accelerate the upgrade of existing apps, and migrate them to MongoDB."

The Lombard Odier IT team defined three initial goals for its initiative:

1. Replace its existing SQL database with MongoDB
2. Migrate from its legacy Java application server to a next-generation framework
3. Automate testing of gen AI use cases

The bank initially decided to develop its portfolio management system (PMS)—its largest application, with approximately 3,000 users where Lombard Odier delivers its platform—which manages shares, bonds, exchange-traded funds and other financial instruments, on MongoDB. MongoDB’s ability to scale was key to this system migration.

Lombard Odier also started to migrate more than 250 applications from its existing Java application server to the bank’s next-generation framework. The bank then decided to go a step further and worked with MongoDB to use gen AI on a marketing application called “Publications” to accelerate the code migration. The developers were also able to use gen AI to feed scenarios during regression testing and automatically generate new code much faster than before.

THE OUTCOME

Driving accelerated migration and innovation

With MongoDB, Lombard Odier is rapidly upgrading its environment. As part of its seven-year GX Program, the bank successfully migrated some key applications from its SQL database and freed up valuable developer resources to focus on leveraging AI and other next-generation technologies to deliver new services to its customers. So far, the bank has achieved significant results.

With a modern infrastructure enhanced by new technologies, Lombard Odier has a newly innovative, developer-friendly culture that has proven attractive to potential hires. MongoDB’s developer data platform, which makes it easy to manipulate objects in the code, is also proving popular with the bank’s IT experts.

And thanks to the cloud-agnostic nature of MongoDB Atlas—which offers the multi-cloud flexibility that the bank will need to meet regulatory requirements—Lombard Odier’s future transition to the cloud will be smooth, ensuring client data remains secure and unimpacted by the bank’s technology modernization.

Overall, overcoming technical debt using gen AI and MongoDB’s advanced tools has been a winning choice for the bank. Indeed, this approach to Lombard Odier’s digital evolution has proven to be fast, cost-effective, and capable of reducing maintenance overhead.

“We’re more than halfway through our modernization initiative, and we’re continuing to industrialize processes. We plan to launch more database migration initiatives with MongoDB in the coming months,” said Bidard.