Agile Maturity in Financial Services

Traditional banks face a key digital transformation challenge. They must modernise their processes and technologies to keep themselves ahead in a highly competitive market.

With this in mind, Caixa Geral de Depósitos (CGD) established strategic objectives to strengthen its presence and market share in corporate business credit, and to enhance its capacity for innovation and digital transformation. One of its initiatives is being performed in partnership with Critical Software, delivering more than a solution: a Digital Way of working. This aims to produce greater value for the bank in handling corporate customers’ credit requests.

Our experience in working with financial services clients on modernising their processes has given us an advantage in finding new, disruptive ways of innovating existing structures. When working with clients, we position ourselves as business partners, mixing customer business knowledge with state-of-the-art technologies to deliver a meaningful transformation process. At the end of this journey, we support our customer by using a Build, Operate, and Transfer model so they can, of their own esteem, continue on their digital transformation journey. 

Critical Software established and delivered innovative architectures during the transformation journey, using a diverse set of technologies and a microservices architecture. We leveraged all our expertise and knowledge-sharing to ensure CGD was kept in-the-loop at all times. We defined an Agile Maturity Model Assessment to challenge the existing way of working and identify the main pain points along the customer journey, helping CGD to become more agile by focusing on continuous improvement.

To support this assessment, we defined a Programme Level Agility Assessment Model based on five pillars: 

• Leadership & organisation 
• People & culture 
• Agile mindset & methods
• Performance & monitoring 
• Continuous integration/continuous delivery

By doing this, we could turn the antiquated processes that were previously used by CGD into disruptive, innovative and long-lasting procedures, creating efficiencies and ensuring better customer service. 

During this journey, we delivered a corporate business credit solution that improved CGD’s commercial agility, increasing base risk penetration rates.In addition, CGD could benefit from the simplification and reduction in time taken to compile commercial proposals, as well as the optimisation of their decision workflow. 

The benefits are reflected in the delivery of a timelier and more focused offer to the customer. As a result, CGD recognises us as a front-running digital enabler, helping to set the standard for the bank’s future digital transformation efforts through leveraging agile modernisation.

• A 50+ element software factory
• Joint teams with CGD
• 5+ multidiscplinary squads 
• Supported by a pool of SMEs (both business and technology).

• Service development software (e.g. Spring Boot)
• Monitoring and alerting programmes (e.g. EFK stack) 
• Containerisation (e.g. Docker) and container orchestration (e.g. Kubernetes)
• Business support (Camunda) and rules engine (e.g. IBM ODM) implementation 
• Client data 360 view (e.g In-Memory Data Grid - Apache Ignite.)
• Automated testing capabilities (e.g. Cucumber)
• Continuous delivery tools (e.g. Jenkins)

Critical has been Caixa Geral de Depósitos's key partner in the adoption of agile methodologies and the facilitation of internal change essential to the success of the digital transformation, as well as in the creation of innovative digital solutions that position CGD at the forefront of Digital Banking.