One of Australia’s ‘Big Four’ banks, our client is dedicated to improving the financial wellbeing of its more than 8.5 million retail and business customers across 30 Asia-Pacific markets.

At the heart of its customer-focused strategy is a commitment to delivering user-friendly services and technologies. However, these need to be agile and resilient enough to ensure that the bank can respond quickly to market challenges without compromising its services or customers’ data security and privacy.

The bank recognized that building partnerships with the right mix of third parties would be critical if it was to deliver on its strategy and support its homeowner and business-owner customer ecosystems.

Our client wanted to work with diverse partners who truly listened to its stakeholders, had proven expertise in managing financial and customer data and could adapt to challenges as they emerged.

A high priority was a global technology partner who could support a sustainable model for maintaining a robust technology platform while delivering year-on-year efficiencies to enable further IT investments.

HCLTech was an obvious choice due to our global coverage, expertise in Microsoft and managed services, expertise in application programming interfaces (APIs) and ability to manage rapidly changing services.

The bank also recognized that working with HCLTech’s highly skilled and qualified staff could help it fill tech skills and talent gaps to ensure business continuity and deliver consistent value to its customers.

Working together, our client and HCLTech agreed on the areas of engagement required and the commercial models to support them. This started with time and materials (T&M) arrangements with mutually agreed, fully transparent pricing.

HCLTech was commissioned to transition 19 applications to a managed services model. The team also launched an “Outcome Based Squads” approach, which draws from more than 250 HCLTech staff to work on specific projects.

The success of these initiatives, along with the sharing of learnings between HCLTech and bank teams, helped build trust and strengthen the partnership. This led to the bank commissioning higher value and more strategically important work to HCLTech.

HCLTech assumed responsibility for the bank’s high-change assets and APIs, as well as the management of 100 additional applications under its managed services arrangement. The Outcome Based Squads have become more culturally integrated into the bank’s technology services.

The HCLTech partnership has helped build the foundations for long-term success, enabling the bank to achieve its objectives.

Saving: The applications under the managed services arrangement are more cost-efficient due to HCLTech’s global delivery model. Savings such as these are enabling the bank to make further IT investments.

Scaling: The bank can also quickly scale and respond to market challenges without compromising business continuity or its customers’ trust.

Trust: The pricing transparency of the early-stage commercial models was vital to building trust between the partners. However, the trusted relationship has resulted in commercial agreements between the bank and HCLTech that move away from T&M arrangements and are increasingly focused on delivering outcomes.

Lasting value: To further build trust, deliver lasting value and mitigate risk for the bank, HCLTech has made a long-term staffing commitment to the partnership. This will ensure knowledge and skills are retained and communications between teams remain consistently high.

Strategic vision: The bank is now focussing on taking advantage of the strategic value of its HCLTech partnership, ensuring it will continue to improve and deliver customer-friendly technologies and services.