Contino Helps Bendigo and Adelaide Bank Establish a Cloud First Strategy

View Video Case Study HERE

The Client

Bendigo and Adelaide Bank (the Bank) is Australia’s ‘better big bank’, with around 7,000 employees helping more than two million customers achieve their financial goals. Its vision is to be Australia’s bank of choice and it is driven by its purpose—to feed into the prosperity of its customers and communities, not off it.

The Challenge

Through its transformation strategy to invest in capability, reduce complexity and tell its story, the Bank is reshaping its business for the future to achieve its vision. The Bank is sustainably investing in new capabilities, partnerships, technology and skills—particularly in customer experience and digital—to combine with its deep human-approach and high-trust levels to better support customers, improve efficiency, and drive value from its technology investments. This includes a significant shift towards a strategic cloud approach.

To deliver on its cloud strategy and transformation objectives, the Bank needed to:

• Bolster its teams’ ability to deliver enterprise scale, secure, and multi-cloud platforms
• Deepen a consistent understanding of cloud technologies
• Meet aggressive timelines for legislative changes, such as The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC’s) Consumer Data Right for banks
• Deliver the enterprise-wide transformation while working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic

Contino was engaged by the Bank to help deliver a cloud adoption framework and establish efficient DevOps models to achieve immediate business benefits. Contino’s dual delivery and upskilling approach was also recognised as a unique element in supporting the Bank’s ongoing organisational growth strategy.

The Solution

Faced with COVID-19 restrictions, and in partnership with Contino, the Bank used cloud tools to enable a highly skilled national team which collaborated remotely to improve the reliability and performance of the Bank’s systems. This was achieved by:

• Designing, implementing and guiding the Bank through a platform transformation enabling a best-of-breed, cloud-based platform and DevOps practice
• Establishing a new partnership with Bank engineers, AWS and third-party suppliers to help successfully move 32 workloads into AWS in 30 days
• Providing the initial technical leadership across two squads—DevOps enablement and cloud platforms—to lay down a strong technical foundation and embed a DevOps culture to consistently deliver high quality business outcomes
• Building foundations for a multi/poly cloud approach by defining and creating modern tooling to support the continued scale-out of the AWS and GCP platforms (Landing Zone, Open Banking platform, Ping Identity and Data Enablement)
• Creating new ways of working in the technology team to rapidly deliver high quality, compliant and secure software change
• Assisting with upskilling the Bank’s staff and initiating regular knowledge sharing sessions to maximise the benefits of an engaged technology community and promote a culture of openness, and technical excellence

The Business Outcome

In partnership with Contino, the Bank successfully:

• Migrated 32 workloads into AWS in 30 days
• Migrated 90+ containerised workloads from an existing cloud tenancy onto AWS via a managed Kubernetes platform, against a hard deadline—all in the space of a month
• Delivered an estimated 60% reduction in cloud usage cost, around 20% performance increase and improved resilience across migrated workloads by at least 30%
• Improved the overall customer experience and speed of application deployment through automation • Established a multi-cloud capability on AWS and GCP within 12 months
• Maintained team cohesiveness and improved engagement by embracing new and innovative ways of communicating and collaborating
• Remotely delivered two cloud tenancies, a managed Kubernetes platform and a migration to new CI/CD tooling

Dual Delivery and Upskilling

With a focus on developing a sustainable solution the Bank could independently maintain, Contino’s dual-delivery approach was perfectly suited. The agreed model enabled Contino consultants to facilitate and support the upskilling of Bank engineers through day-to-day delivery.

Critical to the success of remote delivery was the ‘virtual office’—an always-on, video conference designed to mimic an office environment. Through this initiative, colleagues were able to engage with each other with ease from the ‘main room’, or break out into smaller rooms for specific conversations. There was even a dedicated DJ spinning tunes in the background throughout the day from different playlists!

Contino and the Bank also collaboratively established an in-house technical community and hosted a range of initiatives such as the end-of-week knowledge and best practice sharing sessions—colloquially known as “The Friday Sessions”—which evolved into a powerful learning asset - attracting an average of 100 staff per session. Looking ahead, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank continues its focus on its business transformation, further equipped with stronger credentials in various cloud technologies and a renewed focus on—and commitment to—engineering excellence.

“Bendigo and Adelaide Bank and Contino have forged a fantastic partnership based on trust, quality and mutual respect. Contino’s focus on delivering measurable outcomes has accelerated the Bank’s transformation and adoption of new cloud technologies at a faster pace than we imagined, and we are very proud of the progress we have achieved. “Using Contino’s dual delivery and upskilling approach, we’ve been able to uplift our engineers’ cloud capabilities and technical skills in an open and supportive environment. Initiatives such as “The Friday Sessions” and our ‘virtual office’ space—created when working remotely— are examples of how Contino helped make learning fun and effective for the Bank’s engineers. “Working with partners who are similar culturally and have a shared ethos of investing in their people, has supported our team to help build an amazing Cloud capability the Bank can use to deliver further value to our customers, in line with our vision to be Australia’s bank of choice.”

Ash Austin, Service Owner, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank.

View Video Case Study HERE ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​