Case study: Keytrade Bank’s transformation journey
Belgium’s pioneering digital native bank, Keytrade Bank, partners with Infosys Finacle for strategic evolution.
For more than two decades, Keytrade Bank has been pushing the boundaries of online finance. After starting out as Belgium’s first online trading platform, the Belgian organisation’s retail banking venture was one of the region’s first digitally-native endeavours, making it a genuine pioneer.
In a recent conversation with John Barber, VP and head of Infosys Finacle Europe, Vincent Questiaux, chief information officer (CIO) at Keytrade Bank, and Maria-Cristina Melan, the bank’s head of transformation and testing, spoke about how the digital native bank with 25 years of deep expertise harnesses the cloud and new-generation technologies to unleash a transformation.
John Barber: As a digital native bank setting out on a transformation journey, can you explain why you needed to take this step and how you defined a framework to carry it out?
Maria-Cristina Melan. Image: Keytrade Bank
Maria-Cristina Melan: We have been digitally native for over a quarter of a century, leveraging technology to better serve our customers. But, when new technologies and approaches emerged, it became evident that our legacy environment needed to be updated.
We hold the belief that transformation and evolution rest upon the pillars of organisation, data, and technology. It was with this guiding principle in mind that we transitioned to an Agile approach four years ago. It took us two years to make the transition, and we are now a completely Agile organisation.
Vincent Questiaux: As we took our digital journey forward, migration to the cloud emerged as a clear focus area to build the capabilities like treat big quantities of data that was not possible before. The cloud technology helps to drive competitive advantage in the digital age – accelerated product development, faster time to market, ecosystem collaboration, and enhanced personalisation.
Leveraging cloud technology will empower our teams to meet the rapid delivery demands of Agile, safeguard our data for the future, and foster collaboration with fintechs and other partners. This synergy will drive innovation, expedite market entry, and ultimately amplify the value we provide to our customers.
John Barber: That is fascinating. Can you explain why cloud migration is important and how you executed this transformation strategy?
Vincent Questiaux: Sure. Future-proofing data means preparing it so it can be leveraged to provide insights for rapid innovation and successful go-to-markets (GTMs). Legacy platforms do not allow you to do this, especially with the large volumes of data that have to be tapped into today. This challenge necessitated a move to the cloud so we could harness data and draw insights fast by accessing a diverse, state-of-the-art environment of tools and applications securely.
Similarly, given the pace of technology change today, no one organisation can build the range of capabilities and services that can deliver a smooth, modern customer journey. Moving to the cloud eliminates this bottleneck by allowing us to easily collaborate with other players along the value chain to bring the latest innovations to our customers.
Vincent Questiaux. Image: Keytrade Bank
When it comes to execution, this does not happen overnight. We have been traveling in this direction for five years now. We have been continuously reskilling our experienced IT team to transition from an on-premise environment to a cloud-first one.
Our application architecture must also to evolve seamlessly support cloud-led banking. This entails both macro and some very granular changes, and we have had many brainstorming sessions with Infosys Finacle to identify the gaps and implement these improvements.
John Barber: How has been your journey with Infosys Finacle as a digital transformation partner, and what do you expect from this partnership on this journey?
Vincent Questiaux: Finacle’s technology strategy of modularity and flexibility to accelerate innovation and GTM is completely in alignment with ours.
As a retail bank, we were also looking for comprehensive functional coverage. Infosys Finacle comes with a microservices-based, componentised solution architecture that combines comprehensive functionality and flexibility.
The two considerations, together with the competitive nature of Finacle’s offering, resulted in a healthy return on investment (ROI), helping us make the decision. We also look at other strategic dimensions. A strong corporate social responsibility (CSR) commitment, for instance, is a crucial quality we look for in our partners, and Finacle has displayed this.
Maria-Cristina Melan: As a retail bank, our main goal is to bring innovation to our customers quickly. Finacle shares our beliefs and helps us overcome internal challenges to build operational efficiencies and rapid GTM strategy to achieve this.
With the company’s commitment to constantly upgrading its technologies and embracing cutting-edge approaches, Finacle fulfils the criteria of not just a digital transformation partner, but one who can help us evolve in the long term.
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