Consolidation is a common growth strategy in nearly every industry. While there are many reasons to consolidate—such as economies of scale, or opportunities for new clients, technologies, and geographies—it really comes down to growing a business in the most efficient way possible. And for that, you need the right IT. Though the idea may come from the business side, consolidation has to make IT sense.
A company thinking about consolidating needs the right IT infrastructure and strategy, or results opposite to those intended are likely. How will you merge and leverage resources to get there? What do you need to do it successfully? What if you’re a bank like Chinatrust Commercial Bank (CTBC)?
Before its first expansion in 2006, CTBC had to figure out how to get to the next level. The company wanted to grow, but could it? As it explored the options, it became clear that integration would be a key component to its success. For example, at the time, any new service roll-out required writing code from scratch, ringing up significant time and cost. The efforts of a larger company had to be enhanced by well-integrated systems, and without them, business expansion and growth plans could fail.
Reduce Costs With Integration Technology
Integration projects don’t come without risk. CTBC mitigated that risk by doing a staggered rollout. It first deployed SOA and ESB infrastructure across branches in Taiwan, developing a model bank strategy for accelerating service delivery and boosting customer satisfaction. The architecture transformed the way it built and deployed services. It allowed the company to quickly build services by reusing 30 percent of what developers created. CTBC got integration down to a science, then moved on.
Its second phase of integration—nine branches in China, Hong Kong, Japan, New York, Singapore, and Vietnam—resulted in bigger savings, including an almost 50 percent service reuse rate. This integration success spurred growth to more than 100 new international financial exchange services.
Standard Service Infrastructure Key to Success
By creating a standard service infrastructure and simplifying complex system integration, CTBC reduced services-based costs by 34 percent. Along with cost savings, it accelerated transactions from 150,000 daily to more than 1.2 million—an eight-fold increase. Transaction volume scalability is, of course, extremely critical to continued growth as consumers access a variety of real-time services from every corner of the globe. Phone, web, and in-person transactions are handled with ease with SOA and ESB.
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