Schuberg Philis Helps de Volksbank Gain Insights Faster with Secure, Scalable Data Platform on AWS

De Volksbank had a clear vision for its modern banking platform. It wanted a data platform at the core of its shared services group that would empower its four bank brands with data-driven capabilities to achieve group goals and lead in their respective markets. ASN Bank makes sustainable banking accessible, BLG Wonen makes home ownership more possible for first-time buyers, RegioBank has brought 500 offices to regional customers, and SNS is a bank that offers services to young people, including education and advice to customers who are new to banking.

Sebastiaan Kalshoven, chief technology officer at de Volksbank, leads the generic IT services group. He wanted the data platform to enable each brand to independently use its data platform services to build applications faster, at a lower cost, and to enforce security by design. To support the organization’s DevOps model, he also needed a reliable and scalable IT infrastructure to bring data-driven capabilities to its customer relations, customer service, and administrative departments—across all four brands. Kalshoven’s ideal data platform would give people in these banks access to the right data at the right time so they could optimize profitability, compliance reporting, financial risk, technology, products, services, and staffing.

The challenge for the bank was connecting datasets isolated in financial, banking, and mortgage systems to deliver business value. “We started the data platform three years ago under the assumption it would be easy,” says Kalshoven. “Technology-wise, it was, but breaking down silos is hard.”

De Volksbank chose AWS Partner Schuberg Philis to support the development of the data platform and to untangle its legacy data warehouses. Schuberg Philis was chosen because it had extensive expertise and experience with building and managing systems in regulated sectors. Kalshoven chose to standardize the data platform on AWS for scalability and reliability, and to help foster a new engineering mindset in the platform team. Schuberg Philis’ de Volksbank customer team was responsible for developing the necessary platforms on AWS. This team designed enablement and data platforms on AWS with built-in security guardrails for the banks.

The data platform was built using infrastructure as code (IaC) on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) object storage, and uses Amazon Redshift as a managed cloud data warehouse, which modernizes de Volksbank’s data analytics capabilities. The data platform ensures that de Volksbank can securely provision infrastructure on AWS in a repeatable, reliable, and consistent way. “Using cloud-native AWS technologies gives us the speed, flexibility, and confidence to quickly and safely build solutions on the data platform that give our banks the insights they need, faster,” says Kalshoven.

The platform was built using a secure by design philosophy. It provides standardized building blocks that help accelerate development and ensures that the DevOps teams operate under the bank’s security and compliance guidelines. Using these standard building blocks and IaC ensures that de Volksbank can substantially reduce development effort and achieve quicker time to market for new features. Schuberg Philis is now extending the data platform to the silos where data-driven insights create the most immediate value, such as Know Your Customer (KYC) reporting. There are over a dozen use case project streams underway.

Kalshoven estimates that the platform has resulted in a 15 percent cut in application development time. Additionally, it can now scale up capacity almost instantly and has automated system configuration and management. Kalshoven’s teams are using the platform to run pilots in a sandbox environment to test new use cases for customer, product, and financial data. Among other things, the data platform has enabled the bank to use anonymized ATM transaction data to create insights based on categories of spending. In addition, risk teams are using the platform to improve risk analysis and risk management of mortgage portfolios.

Schuberg Philis continues to manage and optimize the data platform for de Volksbank’s brands to identify more use cases. The success of the data platform has led senior management and compliance auditors to adapt their view that using cloud services is a risk. “The work we’ve done has completely changed management’s views on cloud,” says Kalshoven. “It’s starting to change the bank’s risk-averse DNA towards technology.” Kalshoven’s next vision for the banks is an omnichannel customer experience, where customers can start a process on the mobile banking app and seamlessly complete it at a branch or using other touchpoints. “That requires knowing your customers well enough to personalize their experience across channels,” says Kalshoven. “AWS gives us that flexibility and the opportunity to build this accordingly.”