Bank of Queensland

Bank of Queensland needed to think differently to accelerate its move to the next generation of its Azure cloud environment and help make a change in automation, scalability, and performance. This would allow them to innovate faster and meet customers’ changing expectations, while lowering operating costs.

As one of Australia’s leading financial institutions, this modernization of the application landscape involved moving from its existing data centers and migrating to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. Such a move would allow the bank to enhance security and risk controls, at a time of increasing regulation, while reducing its carbon footprint. It would also address existing challenges associated with phasing out legacy technology as well as simplifying system integrations, such as that following the acquisition of ME Bank.

The bank’s leadership wanted to avoid over-blown budgets, unexpected delays, and unfactored dependencies within their cloud transformation program. So, the Bank of Queensland engaged KPMG Australia, with its wide experience and expertise in cloud transformation, to help ensure Bank of Queensland could avoid the common pitfalls.

KPMG Australia professionals supported the bank to take a different approach: developing iterative business cases and creating a secure and scalable cloud platform. Besides this, KPMG professionals helped the bank set up and run a Cloud Transformation Office (CTO) specifically for orchestrating the program.

Crucially for the program to be successful, this CTO, delivered in collaboration with KPMG and Microsoft, had to be about ‘more than technology skills’ – it required KPMG’s in-depth knowledge of cross-functional capabilities across technology risk, regulatory, cyber, cloud engineering, finance and tax.

In addition, KPMG professionals used industry best practice architectures, security, and automation to help create a standardized application treatment process. The whole cloud transformation program can now scale, securely — with the right resources, the right risk and regulatory policies, and the right CTO governance, in place.

Through this secure cloud platform, the bank has the technical foundations for the next phase of its cloud transformation program, which is designed to also support its wider ambitions for enterprise-wide digital transformation and product digitization.

Working with member firms across the KPMG network, including KPMG in the UK and Azure Engine (a KPMG accelerator), the bank was able to implement an Azure-based cloud platform in three months, rather than the six months to a year that it can typically take.

In addition, the move from its existing data centers to next generation landing zones, the Bank of Queensland estimate it will help to reduce its current hosting costs by 24%.

The technology solution also helps improve the bank’s operational resilience, reliability and efficiency through stronger risk management controls, shorter outage durations and improved collaboration.

With its accelerated journey to a secure cloud platform and simpler technology landscape, the Bank of Queensland can now concentrate on scaling its operations, while reducing costs, and delivering the innovations that will allow it to meet customers’ ever-evolving expectations.