BNZ cements its reputation as a digital banking leader by accelerating its cloud-first strategy with Dynatrace

BNZ’s market expansion strategy required it to reimagine the banking experience for its customers, while still providing a scalable and reliable service. To attract new and younger “digital native” customers, BNZ designed and launched YouMoney, its award-winning online banking capability. Designed as a completely customizable platform focused on user experience, the program extends an all-round financial management capability to its customers. With YouMoney, a customer can seamlessly manage multiple accounts and their finances including mobile access, customized to suit their lifestyles. To support this modern digital banking approach, BNZ had to build the platform from the ground up based on a cloud-first strategy, where all new applications get deployed to the cloud first, and legacy applications are migrated away from on-premises environments.

Managing and monitoring the resulting increasingly complex hybrid infrastructure posed new challenges for BNZ. The bank needed to keep on top of any technical issues that could disrupt interactions. It also had to focus on optimizing user experiences, which meant frequent rollout changes, without risking downtime. To do this, BNZ needed end-to-end visibility into all customer transactions at a granular level, across each touchpoint, and the ability to quickly identify the precise root cause of any issues, so it could anticipate issues and fix them to deliver seamless digital banking experiences.

Knowing that the digital-native customer base can be very demanding and selective, BNZ wanted a continuous mechanism to understand how customers were using its applications so it could better target its innovation efforts, ensure fast delivery of capabilities, and uphold its reputation as a digital leader in the banking space. This meant it had to accelerate its cloud migration efforts. Dynatrace was the clear choice because of the automatic, intelligent observability it provides into both on-premises and cloud environments, and its ability to join the dots across the complex technology stack and individual touchpoints in interactions to pinpoint the exact root cause of issues. With such granular insights, BNZ’s teams can foresee issues and fix them before they adversely impact the customer.

“Migrating our core banking platform to the cloud was akin to performing open heart surgery whilst you’re doing a sprint. The observability and telemetry Dynatrace provided was critical to making that project a success,” commented Nic Olivier, Head of Platforms, Bank of New Zealand. “Radical changes are happening to BNZ’s underlying technology stack. Moving from a single data center to running across multiple data centers, from monolithic to distributed applications. Dynatrace helps us ensure we are providing a world class customer experience, while also delivering innovation faster than ever.”

• Superior customer interactions, every time: Dynatrace provides unparalleled visibility into 85 BNZ applications across more than 2,500 services, giving DevOps teams the ability to join the dots between user experience and backend code, wherever it may reside. This has contributed to a 94% reduction in major incidents over the past five years resulting in superior customer experience.
• Less disruption, higher satisfaction: Dynatrace’s end-to-end automatic observability and AIOps capabilities identify the root-cause of issues instantly, so BNZ’s teams can get ahead and correct them fast. For example, Dynatrace was able to show that a considerable slowdown in customer transactions could be solved by rebuilding a faulty platform and migrating the application to a new set of databases to work around the problem without disrupting users.
• Timely innovation: With fewer issues to resolve, BNZ’s DevOps teams have more time to work on optimizing customer experiences and rolling out new services and functionality. Over the past five years, the bank has seen a 58% increase in speed of innovation, helping solidify its place as a digital market leader.
• Increased operational efficiencies: Dynatrace works seamlessly alongside other key solutions in BNZ’s toolchain, such as ServiceNow. This drives automated end-to-end DevOps workflows and further efficiencies that help the bank to optimize user experiences, increase the speed, and enhance the quality of changes it deploys to its production applications for colleagues and customers.

“The BNZ tagline is ‘If you can imagine a better future, let’s find a way.’ I think the tagline perfectly sums up the relationship between BNZ and Dynatrace,” continued Olivier. “By instrumenting our core banking platforms, we’re absolutely finding a better way for our customers – providing them with the ultimate digital banking experience. We are innovating faster than ever before, and with fewer issues.”