Industry
Banking
Banking Services Transformation: Unlocking Exponential Value
Solution
TCS BaNCS™
TCS BaNCS™: Enabling Transformation in Banks and Financial Institutions
Highlights
- A Swiss bank adopted agile delivery for transformation.
- TCS reduced the impact of these agile upgrades by using a digital minimal core. It maintained real-time transaction feeds and accurate balance inquiries during software upgrades.
- After implementing the zero-downtime solution, the new database managed the switchover during the latest upgrade while handling 375 queries per second, whereas the Cash block database handled over 400,000 transactions.
Agile upgrades
TCS BaNCS and a leading Swiss bank collaborated on a zero-downtime solution, ensuring availability and enhanced features for automated teller machines (ATM) and point-of-sale (POS) services during software upgrades and rollouts.
TCS BaNCS, as the core banking provider, worked with the bank to reduce the impact of these agile upgrades using a digital minimal core that, even during a software upgrade, provided:
- Real-time feed of transactions across customer channels.
- Ensured extended availability of ATM and POS services.
- Maintained consistent availability of accurate balance inquiries.
Figure 1. Planned and unplanned outages for a leading Swiss bank during quarterly rollouts
Difficult downtime
ATMs and POS machines serve as key connections between banks and their customers, allowing 24/7 interactions and a convenient way for customers to make payments and check their balances. When ATMs and POS machines are out of service, customers experience significant inconvenience, frustration, and possibly financial losses.
In 2022, the bank began running quarterly rollouts as part of a larger transformation initiative. This doubled the frequency of planned shutdowns, which caused added disruption to critical services and a visible impact on end users and customers.
Preparing for a planned outage was a significant effort. Even though several tasks were automated, they had to be choreographed precisely across multiple systems with a long lead time for planning and preparation.
From the customer's perspective, critical services became unavailable for 90 minutes during a planned outage, and inquiry services were unavailable for 30 minutes. Customers were notified that they would have to withdraw cash in advance, an inconvenience compounded by the confusion caused by outdated customer balances.
The downtime was even more pronounced during unplanned outages that could take hours to rectify, leading to even higher customer dissatisfaction.
Zero-downtime
TCS BaNCS and the Swiss bank worked together on a zero-downtime solution that ensured uninterrupted ATM and POS services during software upgrades and rollouts. The solution was built using the microservices approach to software development and employed an API that could be accessed by any system, present or future, with minimal local configuration changes. It also leveraged a parallel database Cash block and integration layer designed to maintain balances and transactions, even during core database updates.
Figure 2. Zero downtime and channel integration during software upgrades and rollouts.
Figure 3. Quarterly Rollouts (or) Infrastructure Changes after implementing TCS BaNCS zero-downtime solution.
With TCS BaNCS, the bank created a solution to transfer transactions from Cash block to customer channels called "Authorization Holds." These holds are as legitimate as those sent from the standard systems of record. By implementing this approach, the bank ensured that accurate balance information was provided. While this solution was created specifically for the bank, the microservices can be easily reused as a generic solution for any TCS BaNCS customer.
A frictionless solution
During the bank’s most recent software upgrade, the new database handled the switchover even while receiving 375 queries per second, and the Cash block database managed over 400,000 transactions during the downtime window.
Figure 4. The new database performance during the bank’s software upgrade.
The combination of simplicity, non-invasiveness, and frictionless operations was a big success for the bank, which now finds it easier to schedule and plan software upgrades without expensive planning cycles or disruptions to service availability. The microservices-based solution also demonstrates a viable approach for other software development projects at the bank.
The TCS BaNCS team received a commendation from the bank’s executive board: “The switch [to Cash block] solved a knot that made a new timing possible,” said an IT & Operations executive. “The new release timing is a major step and strongly supports our goals as one of the leading digital banks and towards continuous digital availability.”
With TCS BaNCS, the bank achieved the goal of zero downtime, with seamless availability of services on all customer channels, all without the need for a major overhaul of core application components. Customers across the bank’s retail, business, and corporate footprint also maintain access to accurate information across channels, with continuous uptime and availability.
