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April 03, 2023

ABN AMRO migrates business-critical financial reporting to Azure for increased speed, flexibility, and control

As one of the Netherlands’ leading financial institutions, ABN AMRO knows how to make smart, data-driven decisions that maximize value and mitigate risk. The bank uses its expertise to deliver value to its customers, but it also applies its good sense to enhancing its own internal processes. As part of its crucial reporting requirements, the bank had a complicated workflow that depended on a host of on-premises systems, took a few days to complete, and was prone to delays. To gain greater flexibility and control over its reporting processes, ABN AMRO decided to migrate the workflow to the cloud, and it chose Microsoft Azure as its cloud infrastructure platform.

ABN AMRO BANK

“Since our Azure migration, we’ve gained greater control and managed to cut process delay times from 24 hours to 8, which allows us to catch up to any delays three times faster than before.”

Laurens Teuben, IT Engineering Lead, ABN AMRO

Taking business-critical applications to the cloud

ABN AMRO historically ran its digital infrastructure through two on-premises datacenters, which it outsourced for ongoing management and maintenance. The problem with this approach was that every time the bank needed to scale up, a significant amount of time, effort, and expense was required, both in coordinating the parties involved and in procuring and installing hardware. Seeking greater agility, the bank adopted a DevOps approach and embarked on a cloud-migration strategy called Project Apollo. Through its cloud migration, ABN AMRO’s goal was to simplify and automate processes, enable faster scaling, and help ensure the performance and resilience of its business-critical applications.

The bank sought to migrate close to 3,000 applications to the cloud, 300 of which were business critical, and to date, about 230 have been migrated. ABN AMRO selected Azure as its cloud migration solution because it simplifies meeting the bank’s security and compliance requirements as a regulated financial institution. 

Of all the business-critical applications slated for migration, perhaps none are as sizable and important as ABN AMRO’s finance and risk General Ledger Mainbank platform, which it uses for general ledger reporting. The platform generates internal, integrated finance and risk reporting to help the bank meet its compliance requirements with regulatory bodies like the Dutch Central Bank and the European Central Bank regarding customer assets. 

For the bank to succeed in meeting its monthly reporting requirements, it required its various financial groups to enter their relevant data into General Ledger Mainbank each day. While these groups usually uploaded their data promptly, they did occasionally experience delays in sourcing information, which caused a cascading effect. “With our former infrastructure, one delay would hold up the entire process and all parties involved for 24 hours,” says Laurens Teuben, IT Engineering Lead at ABN AMRO. By migrating to the cloud, ABN AMRO is gaining more flexibility and faster time to market.

Optimizing the migration

The General Ledger Mainbank platform consists of a general ledger application, the Wolters Kluwer OneSumX for Finance, Risk, and Regulatory Reporting solution suite, and an extract, transform, and load (ETL) application. The data that the platform ingests currently resides in ABN AMRO’s on-premises datacenters, where the ETL application extracts, transforms, and loads it into Azure. The solution uses Azure ExpressRoute and its high bandwidth as a means of connecting its on-premises datacenters with the bank’s Azure SQL Database instance.

The OneSumX application is already running on Azure using Azure Virtual Machines, and the bank is also in the process of migrating its ETL application, so the entire platform workflow will soon be fully Azure native. Additionally, ABN AMRO is helping secure its workloads in Azure with Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender for Cloud. The bank uses Microsoft Sentinel to conduct advanced threat protection for its General Ledger Mainbank platform and the other applications it has migrated to Azure, and it uses Azure Monitor for end-to-end observability of its Azure environment.

By migrating its reporting platform to Azure, ABN AMRO has been able to speed up and enhance its process. “Since our Azure migration, we’ve gained greater control and managed to cut process delay times from 24 hours to 8, which allows us to catch up to any delays three times faster than before,” Teuben observes. “Thanks to our Azure migration, we can fully guarantee that our business-critical reporting is up to date to the last day of each month, and we can now deliver all of our reporting in only one day—it used to take us several days to catch up after a delay.”

Enhancing scale, flexibility, and control

With the adoption of a DevOps approach and the migration of applications to the cloud, ABN AMRO’s IT team is now operating at a much higher level. “I really appreciate the scalability we’ve gained through Azure, but I’m also excited about our time to market,” says Teuben. “We can now deliver reporting faster for the business, and we have complete control with Azure.” Having one comprehensive environment through the Azure platform provides the bank with an authoritative, single source of truth and the right controls it needs to align and streamline IT teams.

Moreover, ABN AMRO’s shedding of its datacenters allows IT to work more efficiently. IT no longer needs to retain skill sets for supporting hardware, and it’s pursuing more efficient ways to architect its applications in the cloud. The DevOps team is exploring application adjustments to potentially reduce the quantity of virtual machines that are currently required. “We’re examining parallel processing to alleviate some issues and reduce time and effort,” says Teuben. “This optimization will help us further enhance our reporting processes by speeding up catch-up times in some cases from five days down to a single day.”

The bank is pleased with how much more it can get done now with Azure, which has helped elevate IT as an integral and truly strategic arm of the business. Indeed, since its Azure migration, IT has experienced a significant increase in staff retention, with engaged employees keen to continue working in an innovative environment. “We’re now working in a state-of-the-art environment thanks to Azure, and we can really demonstrate our business value and show that we can innovate faster whenever we need to,” concludes Teuben.

Find out more about ABN AMRO on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

“I really appreciate the scalability we’ve gained through Azure, but I’m also excited about our time to market. We can now deliver reporting faster for the business, and we have complete control with Azure.”

Laurens Teuben, IT Engineering Lead, ABN AMRO

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