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From time to time, we invite industry thought leaders to share their opinions and insights on current technology trends to the IT Infrastructure blog. The opinions in these blogs are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of IBM.

The world moves quickly, and consumers want their banks to evolve fast too. The combination of rising customer expectations and emerging regulations is putting the banking industry under pressure to keep innovating.

At Fiducia & GAD IT AG, we support 30 percent of Germany’s banks with the IT services they need to continue to impress customers. When we noticed workload fluctuating even more than usual, we looked for a way to unlock more flexibility from our IT infrastructure without increasing costs too much.

With the introduction of the second European Union Directive on Payment Services (PSD2) and instant payments, we knew that the rate of change was only going to accelerate. Our goal: find a way to accommodate new workload peaks in a more cost-effective manner, to ensure that we didn’t stand in the way of innovation.

Removing barriers to agility

At the core of our IT infrastructure is one of the world’s largest IBM Z implementations. When we heard about IBM’s new consumption-based pricing model for IBM Z solutions—Tailored Fit Pricing–we knew that it could have a big impact on our operations.

With Tailored Fit Pricing, our fee is based on total million service unit (MSU) consumption by workload containers, rather than the rolling four-hour average (R4HA) peak. As a result, monthly workload surges don’t have the same effect that they used to on our costs, capacity planning is simplified and we’re able to absorb increasing usage while keeping costs under control.

We also opted for the DevTest offering, enabling us to create a larger, fixed capacity DevTest environment that’s always available to our developers.

Delivering greater value

Our IBM solutions continue to provide benefits. Using this latest project, we decreased response times across our productions systems by 5 percent and our nightly batch window by 25 percent. This frees up resources we can use to drive growth for the FinanzGruppe cooperative—Germany’s most extensive banking service network.

A big advantage of Tailored Fit Pricing is the transparency it gives us around IT costs. In the past, a team of between 10 and 15 people from our operations, production and systems administration would gather on our busiest days to decide whether to add capacity. Now, we only need two or three people to focus on capacity planning.

Our developers now have even greater freedom to innovate. Consequently, we’re seeing development cycles drop by 20 percent, helping us get new services and features to customers sooner. With more than 82 million customer accounts supported by our systems, it gives us great peace of mind to know that our banks can continue to improve their offerings without pause.

Want to know more? Read the case study for more details.

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