Major European bank modernises credit risk technology

Major European bank modernises credit risk technology

Leading investment bank delivers multi-year programme to transform its ability to manage credit risk globally

As part of a multi-year transformation programme, the bank requested GFT’s support with implementing microservices, rebuilding several business-critical credit applications, and overhauling its data storage and management capability. Now complete, the project will deliver over €10m in savings, drastically improve the bank’s regulatory posture and productivity by 10%.

>€10m over three years

By decommissioning legacy systems, coupled with improved system performance, productivity and stability

Risk reduction

By transformational change to the bank’s regulatory posture – i.e., by outperforming regulations around data management, storage, manual processing.

Optimised decision-making

With a single source of truth (data) and improved data quality, decision-making is optimised across the organisation.

Background

A department of about 1,000 employees, the bank’s credit risk function supports the decision-making of thousands of employees, in multiple departments, across various regions. Yet the underlying technology on which the function relied was beginning to show its age.

Challenge

Modernisation of a complex legacy system

The existing credit risk system comprised more than ten standalone applications. This was leading to duplication of effort, user dissatisfaction, and slow service delivery. The system’s complexity also meant that significant effort was required to keep pace with technical developments across the organisation.

Risks and vulnerabilities

By relying on this outdated and complex system, the bank was vulnerable to clear risks. For example:

The existing system ingested data from >200 sources and stored it in >100 separate systems. This approach exposed the bank to system errors and data inaccuracies.
Employees in the credit risk function had become accustomed to operating with 100s of instances of manual checking and reporting. While this allowed users to quickly generate reports to inform decision-making, this approach lacked transparency and is prone to error.

Taken together, these issues characterised a system that was struggling to align with existing regulations and was unfit to adapt to even more stringent regulations arriving in 2025.

The need for change was clear, and there was no time to waste in selecting a trusted and experienced partner that could deliver. With its unrivalled financial technology expertise, and decades of experience in delivering major strategic projects for financial institutions globally, GFT was perfectly placed to tackle the challenge at hand.

Engagement

People, process, and technology enhancements

>100 GFT engineers have worked with the bank over several years to create the new credit risk system and to optimise processes and project management. The new system now stands as a unified, globally integrated platform, marking a step forward from the previous fragmented applications. Key project elements included:

GFT supported the bank’s internal teams to redevelop three business-critical applications. While three different vendors had already tried and failed to rebuild one application for the bank, GFT not only succeeded but was able to make key application functions 400% faster, even under maximal load.

With GFT’s support, the bank replaced its monolithic architecture with a microservices model, allowing each module to be updated, tested, and scaled independently. Additionally, this new system has been designed and deployed on a private, internal cloud, positioning it for potential migration to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in the future. Microservices

Since 2018, GFT teams have implemented several Agile project management methodologies including SAFe (Scalable Agile Framework).

Over several years, GFT helped to develop a single database for all credit risk data and oversaw multiple migration projects to consolidate various data stores into single data storage.

Benefit

A new credit risk system that’s revolutionising performance

GFT’s experts have outperformed the customer’s expectations and have made long-lasting impacts at the application and business level. These include:

Data: GFT helped to consolidate >200 sources of data (stored in >100 systems) into a single source of truth. This new data store supplies data to all credit risk applications in minutes. Most importantly, data quality has improved, yielding major enhancements in decision-making, traceability, and risk reduction. For instance, the bank has transformed its data management, storage, and processing capability, and is therefore outperforming regulations, including Dodd-Frank & EMIR, BCBS 239, Basel III, CCAR, ICAAP.
Agility: A microservices architecture paired with a highly optimised, modular code base provides redundancy and massively improves compute capacity. This will allow the system to scale easily as the demands of the function increase over time – something which would have been impossible using the previous system.
Efficiency: Process automation has enabled the bank to remove numerous instances of manually checking within the function. Critically, Risk Manager productivity has improved by 25%, and in one instance, report-generation time fell by 21 days!

“The programme delivered against our core banking commitments and achieved a significant reduction of costs. The technical and functional knowledge GFT provided, based on multiple years of business-related experience was of paramount importance in our success and this is why we continue to engage with them.”

Senior Leader

Client

Staying ahead of regulations

The new credit risk system has revolutionised the bank’s ability to monitor, manage, and mitigate credit risk across the organisation. In fact, the bank has not only rocketed ahead of existing financial regulations, but it is also perfectly positioned to meet new regulations that are expected to arrive in 2025. This is thanks in part to the agility and resilience conferred by the bank’s new internal cloud and microservices architecture.