We’ve seen a huge shift in mobile commerce over the last year. According to a Time article, “Nearly 70% of Amazon’s customers shopped via mobile devices this holiday season.” The same article referenced Walmart’s announcement in December that stated more than 70% of traffic to its website is coming from mobile, and about half of holiday orders were placed using a mobile device. Not only has mobile established itself as a dominant trend in shopping, but it has begun to take over the banking industry.

Millennials are constantly using mobile phone and tablets over a desktop, and banking is no different. Just as banks should be migrating their legacy systems to cover their security bases, they should be migrating to mobile to adapt to today’s consumers who value the convenience of a mobile app. As the demand for mobile apps continues to increase, banks should be leveraging technology to deliver value and meet today’s standards for user experience.

Mobilization is also a major factor in Google rankings and, for many enterprise-level companies, having a mobile-enabled site or application can also be key to getting and, more importantly, keeping customers. Banks, insurance agencies, and the like are now almost defined by their ability to make themselves available anywhere, anytime. For those who have a long history, legacy systems can be a significant barrier to these goals.

Here at Morphis we have a wealth of experience modernizing banks’ legacy systems to adhere to today’s standards. Here is an example of an international bank we worked with to integrate its systems and eliminate redundancy among its middleware stacks to improve the bank’s operations.

Client

When Banco Popular Español, the fourth largest banking group in Spain, acquired Banco Nacional de Crédito (BNC) in Portugal, a major integration of IT systems was required.

Challenge/Solution

The integration project was made all the more difficult by a lack of understanding and the absence of technical documentation for the legacy systems.

Morphis’ tools were used to:

– produce documentation for the bank’s operations of the bank agencies front-end application and of the online banking application.
– document all of the middleware which was based on a legacy technology (Fujitsu TP16/TP32) that had to be replaced. This required the implementation of a set of Mining and Generation rules to detect and organize all the internal TP16, TP32 and COBOL modules and their inter-relations. This documentation supported the middleware substitution.
– document all the web channel applications, including mainframe access to middleware, that had to be modernized together with the generation of a full new COBOL API level to expose all the mainframe accessible services to the new middleware.

With the appropriate documentation in place to support the bank’s system integration and modernization needs, Morphis was able to support the difficult integration challenges arising from the acquisition.