ABN AMRO delivers industry-specific functionality in the cloud faster

For ABN AMRO Bank—one of the Netherlands’ largest full-service banks—the drivers for a move to the public cloud seemed irresistible. The bank would always have access to the latest software functionality as soon as it became available. Its software development would get both faster and cheaper, so the bank could deliver innovative products and services to its customers more quickly. And by speeding up the delivery of innovative services, the bank would eliminate one of the key rationales for shadow IT.

But a speed bump of sorts lay in its path.

“We were coming from an outsourced technology situation and didn’t have cloud expertise in-house,” says Jaap Crum, Head of IT Technology Development & Cloud Platforms at ABN AMRO Bank. “We needed help to kick-start this initiative with sufficient resources. We needed a partner.”

Crum and his colleagues found that help in the Azure Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) and that partner in Microsoft. Through the CCoE, Microsoft DevOps consultants provided coaching and expertise to speed the use of the public cloud, driving business innovation, increasing agility, and reducing time-to-value.

ABN AMRO used help from Microsoft Industry Solutions, including a direct line into the Microsoft product group, to adopt highly effective ways to manage its cloud use and security. As a result, the bank’s IT team functions more successfully as a partner to internal business users—giving those users more flexibility and independence in creating their cloud solutions while ensuring that those solutions operate within the bank’s accepted parameters.

“A huge benefit of the CCoE is the experience it brings us,” says Jan Maarten de Klein, Product Development Manager, Microsoft Azure, at ABN AMRO. “In financial institutions, security and compliance in the public cloud environment are crucial and require high skills and knowledge. The access we had to Microsoft specialists—for example, interacting directly with our audit and legal personnel to confirm our full compliance—gave us the confidence to move forward and reduced the time to get regulatory approval to use confidential data in the public cloud. I don’t think we would have started our cloud journey without our partnership with Microsoft, exemplified by the CCoE.”

ABN AMRO also used CCoE expertise to integrate secure-by-design principles into its development process, replacing a former process that considered security as a near-final step. The result not only makes products more secure but reduces the time needed to deliver them. One of those new cloud-based applications uses Azure to reduce costly false positives from fraud detection. Another gives bank representatives better tools to improve debt repayment on delinquent accounts. 

“Our partnership with Microsoft helps us to make everything we do in IT go faster,” says Crum. “Even better, we engage more directly with the business, so we deliver more direct business value. That’s a very big change for us.”