British Financial Institution Saves £12m Per Annum on Change

The problem

A British financial institution processes an incredible amount of transactions through their 24/7 online and digital channels. Making changes to these systems involves a high level of risk and they can’t afford outages. Major releases used to require at least ten walkthroughs for briefings and approvals, making change slow and costly. They needed to improve their capacity to release more technology change, reduce release failures and ensure that an audit trail was put in place for regulatory and learning purposes.

How we helped

When orchestrating their change events in Cutover, the financial institution saw an improved level of risk mitigation, ensuring planned maintenance and upgrades to their online and digital channels were carried out correctly.

• The platform enabled them to avoid follow-on incidents that could have affected customers.
• They saw a number of benefits when orchestrating these changes with Cutover:
• Building the release plans for technology changes based on Cutover templates now take hours rather than days.
• Multiple release walkthroughs were reduced to one simulated dry run on Cutover utilizing the platform’s human and machine orchestration capability.
• Key stakeholders were provided with better live information to keep them fully informed on progress and able to make decisions based on current, not aged, status.
• The business had greater control of the event

The results

The financial institution estimated that a number of the global development centers performed one extra large-scale release over the year that was previously unachievable. In some cases, this represented up to a 20% increase in capacity. They also made an estimated saving of around £12m per annum by avoiding incidents.

Cutover is now regularly used to drain the bank, coordinate change and rebuild the bank over a weekend. They have reduced the duration of change execution by 15% thanks to improved efficiency and capacity.

"The ability to automate communications to stakeholders across the business
through one system enables us to manage change consistently, reducing customer impact and increasing business confidence in a successful delivery.”

Head of Insight & Innovation of a British Multinational Financial Institution