Big Four South African Bank

The banking and financial services industry is a core pillar of our society, and ensuring businesses like banks operate efficiently is critical to our global economy. As one of South Africa’s four biggest banks, this institution is a key player in this ecosystem. Established in 1831, the bank has a rich history of serving its communities. Today, it has 7.6 million clients across Africa and is supported by more than 28,000 employees.

A modern institution, the bank has employed new technologies to accomplish its goal of being a customer-centric organization. Attachmate had been their 3270 terminal emulation provider for 16 years, and the bank was experiencing several challenges related to the deployment of software to Windows 10 and the integration of Blue Prism. The Attachmate solution was not keeping pace with the growing infrastructure of their organization. Attachmate gave the bank the option to upgrade the application; however, the cost of undertaking the project was not in line with the partnership they had built with the vendor for the past decade and a half.

Instead of upgrading, the bank considered migrating away from Attachmate. They initially engaged with Rocket Software and Rocket’s partner, a South African IT infrastructure and software distributor, in early 2018 to review alternatives. There were many economic and political barriers to overcome before any work could begin; a general election in South Africa had sparked protests and rioting, causing continued power outages that disrupted businesses. The bank also wanted a partner they could trust, especially one who understood the culture of doing business with organizations within their region and industry. This is where our experience and existing relationship with a local company like Rocket’s partner helped convince the team that they understood what it meant to meet the needs of a client in the South African banking industry.

Results

The bank knew that they wanted a cost-effective terminal emulator that could easily integrate with their Blue Prism RPA architecture and decided to move forward with Rocket BlueZone. As part of the process in building the trust between the bank and Rocket, the engagement started with a trial implementation of the new solution. Rather than immediately replacing the Attachmate application, the customer began by testing BlueZone with 65 users. It only took a few virtual sessions between the Rocket and the internal teams to configure the Blue Prism application, after which the bank was able to handle the trial themselves. The trial process was seamless and easy, especially since Rocket staff were able to engage with the application teams at the bank and quickly resolve any implementation issues.

In the early stages of the project, our Support, Sales Engineering, Sales, and R&D groups worked as a team and communicated the way forward clearly to the bank, alleviating the initial concerns of a full replacement. A scalable solution with minimal storage requirements and centralized distribution features that cut down on administrative overhead, BlueZone was the cost-effective answer to the expensive application update proposed by Attachmate. Now, there are 2,500 concurrent end users running the BlueZone solution. Even after 16 years of using the Attachmate solution, the customer was able to complete the migration process with no professional services support and was up and running with BlueZone within a few months. When people depend on services as essential as banking every day, ensuring that there is minimal disruption to operations is priceless.