Datamatics is a global consulting, information technology (IT), data management, and business process management (BPM) organisation focused on delivering innovative, next-generation business solutions to help enterprises worldwide overcome their business challenges. Datamatics has a presence in 7 countries – USA, UK, Switzerland, The Netherlands, India, Philippines, and UAE, enabling it to serve over 200 customers globally

Datamatics’ client is one of the most prominent Islamic banks in the Middle East. The Islamic financial services industry is one of the fastest-growing sectors – especially in the GCC economies, with a growth of nearly 20% in 2020 to reach $1.3 trillion. The client had acquired another bank which increased its combined assets to more than AED 300 billion (~$80 billion) and made it one of the largest banks in the UAE. The bank wanted to integrate the IT systems and infrastructure and needed a robust governance framework focused on a minimal customer and market impact.

Project scope: Integrating business units with the acquired bank

The bank wanted to integrate its various business units and their underlying IT systems and infrastructure with the acquired bank. The bank had historical data of the last five years and over 400,000 customer bank accounts in total. The data size amounted to more than 100 terabytes, which the bank wanted to seamlessly integrate into the new system. The bank lacked data management experts who could locate the data from different systems, resulting in the bank’s data being scattered across multiple locations.

The bank selected Datamatics’ Enterprise Data Management (EDM) solution to enable its data migration journey.

Implementation process

The bank wanted to integrate the IT systems and infrastructure and needed a robust governance framework focused on minimal customer and market impact. Datamatics understood the business and significance of the data migration process from one bank to another.

The company identified the key aspects that needed to be considered during the cutover framework development, which helped mitigate risks for the bank’s operations and all other workstreams to ensure that their objectives were not compromised by the typical programme timeline and scope management challenges.

Datamatics identified more than 20 applications for app to app migration, for which 600 plus ETL (extract, transform, and load) jobs were created as part of the migration process. The company also identified more than 30 applications for data migration to the bank’s Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) environment.

Datamatics implemented IBM DataStage for migrating data of both the banks into a single system after defining multiple business rules for different kinds of data and ensured that the source data matched with the destination data. Data was also defined based on priorities, migrating high priority and medium priority data before the go-live date and migrating the remaining data post going live with the new system. The entire data loading process from the source bank’s system to the destination bank’s system was completed within two days.

The data for migration comprised of regulatory, semi-structured, CSV, excel, and downstream applications. Critical to banks and customers, data-related applications such as AECB, CASA, ACCOUNTING, GL, Treasury, and Trade Loan were successfully migrated without defects.

The team actively provided inputs for the data migration process flow in terms of system mapping, data mapping from source and target applications teams, business criteria, and historical data requirements, which helped to create a robust process flow with appropriate guidelines. Migration of application data detailed understanding of the complex business process, addressing data issues, which required continuous efforts and overlapped with the client’s requirement for UAT, defect fixing.

Challenges

While the migration of critical data was completed without any error, the project had its fair share of challenges to overcome. Since the banks were using different systems while operating independently, the representation of data in both banks was different. It had to be matched meticulously to integrate all the relevant data into a single system.

Many systems of the acquired bank were different from the acquirer bank’s systems, so defining KPIs was challenging. Cross-functional teams worked round the clock to ensure a smooth and speedy transition with minimal system and channel downtime.

While the initial timeline for the project completion was ambitious, it became much more challenging due to the prevailing adversities of the global macroeconomic environment. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, there were ongoing travel restrictions, and most of the project team worked remotely. With an increased focus on planning and alignment of delivery capabilities, Datamatics was able to close the project well ahead of the projected deadline.

Benefits

Datamatics migrated more than 400,000 accounts successfully along with app and Data Warehouse data. It completed the integration ahead of the timeline of 1 year while maintaining quality and accuracy even while working remotely. The company also developed 150+ control reports that displayed source output, target output, and their difference.

Conclusion

Using the EDM solution, the bank was able to seamlessly integrate its business with the acquired bank. The combined entity is one of the largest Islamic banks in the Middle East. With an integrated data management system, it is well-positioned to tap into the potential of the Islamic financial services industry.

Key Facts

• Supplier: Datamatics
• Headquarters: New Jersey, US
• Founded: 1975
• Client: A leading Islamic Bank in the Middle East
• Solution: Enterprise Data Management
• Timeline: January 2020 – January 2021