Background

Our client is the biggest banking group in the Middle East, in terms of assets and is a market leader across core business lines. it is the leading retail banking franchise in the UAE, with over 129 combined branches and over 650 ATMs / Cash Deposit Machines spread across the UAE.

The Group is a major player in the corporate banking arena, with a combined market share of almost a fth of corporate loans. With a fast growing Islamic banking af liated entities, strong investment and private banking services and a leadership in the eld of asset management products, our client is well positioned to grow and deliver outstanding value to its shareholders, customers and employees.

Our client received many prominent awards such as Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Business Award for Finance, Best Bank in the UAE by Global Finance 2009, Best Retail Bank in UAE by The Banker Magazine and Outstanding Private Bank in the Middle East by VRL Financial News.

Challenges

The Client wanted to revamp its E-Banking application to integrate with its new core banking solution, while retaining the capability to operate the existing core banking platform.

• Integration of its E-Banking application to function seamlessly from a single cut over date. Accomplish System Integration testing, 3 UAT’s, 4 Drills and 5 Full Bank Simulations within planned time frames.
• Mapping and Veri cation of data for migration and its impact on E-Banking application ensuring no data loss (Specific impact on Reports and MIS data).
• Maintaining sanity in its E-Banking application while ensuring proper integration with all other impacted systems to ensure comprehensive system compatibility.
• End to end processing of all transactions to be migrated from the old core banking application to the new one, across all functionalities on a single day without any business interruption to customers.

Solution

• Scope of testing involved working on a single platform accessing two separate systems — the old core banking application and the new one,ensuring the integration had no adverse impacts.
• Timely completion of testing of all functionalities across the system helped in raising critical issues. Effective resource allocation played an integral part.
• Procuring existing data, maintaining data tables and values, and understanding the impact of retaining data, assisted in smooth handling of data veri cation for migration. Full veri cation was conducted as per the bank’s prescribed guidelines.
• Knowledge of banking domain, gained through past experience, helped in effective liaison with other dependent and linked systems like Exim Bills, TIBCO, Swift Alliance, Vision+ and external servers of Telecom and Utility services.
• Full scoping of test requirements, employing best practices, proper documentation and project handling, use of wide range of testing tools and technology, ability to understand system functionalities of both old and new core banking application and being an effective extended team of the bank, helped in accomplishing the goals set forth.

Results

On cut over date, customers are able to transact business with absolutely no interruption or inconvenience.

E-Banking application integration with the new core banking application was adhered to in time, which ensured that the E-Banking customers were able to use the system seamlessly, on cutover date.

On cutover date, E-Banking customers were able to access past and archived data from the same platform, despite data dependency on different locations / systems.

The bank was able to release E-Banking in totality to its customers on cut over date and appreciated the efforts and role of Testhouse in its success. No major issues were reported.