YES Bank upgrades to core banking system in record three months time

YES BANK, India's fourth largest private sector Bank. Since its inception in 2004, YES BANK has fructified into a ‘"Full Service Commercial Bank" that has steadily built Corporate and Institutional Banking, Financial Markets, Investment Banking, Corporate Finance, Branch Banking, Business and Transaction Banking, and Wealth Management business lines across the country, and is well equipped to offer a range of products and services to corporate and retail customers.

YES BANK has adopted international best practices, the highest standards of service quality and operational excellence, and offers comprehensive banking and financial solutions to all its valued customers. Today, YES BANK has a widespread branch network of over 500 branches across 350 cities, with 1050+ ATMs and 2 National Operating Centers in Mumbai and Gurgaon.

The Yes Bank won the C-Change Enterprise Connect Award 2014 in Project Managmenet category for its implementation of  Platform upgrade for core banking systems.

Here is a case study of the implementation:

Pre core banking system scenario

At the beginning of financial year 2010-11, the Yes Bank embarked on a journey into the next phase of growth and launched YES BANK - VERSION 2.0, Building the Best Quality Bank of the World in India. Version 2.0 is a vision of establishing 750 branches, 3000 ATMs, 12,000 employees, Rs 125,000 Cr. Deposit base, Rs 100,000 Cr. Loan book and a Rs 150,000 Cr. Balance Sheet size by 2015.

As the bank had crossed the half way mark of version 2.0 and with YBL's continued focus on sustaining rapid growth targets, increasing customer acquisition especially on the liabilities front along with high focus on quality and customer service, it became imperative that the bank's core systems, are scalable and have high degree of performance, stability and availability.

Challenge:

Yes Bank was faced with a challenge of upgrading its bank's core systems in just three months to make sure that they are scalable and have high degree of performance, stability and availability. The bank had to embarked on a journey of upgrading its core banking and Internet banking systems to the latest technology platform providing high degree of stability, scalability, performance and availability and address technology obsolescence issues.

Implementation:

This project involved a two step process over 3 months which were executed in conjunction:

1. Data center revamp: upgrading our hardware and network setup to the latest highly scalable technologies

2. Core banking and net banking platform upgrade

This project involved a huge team size of 150 people across Application and solutions team, IT Infrastructure team, business teams and our partners working over 90 days with precision and in a harmonious synchronized way to the detailed and precise laid out plan. The sheer size of operation and execution for this project makes this a significant achievement for the Bank and the teams involved and showcases / is a true reflection of our prowess and capability.

 

 

This is the first milestone to provide a stable and scalable platform to the business to achieve the bank's Version 2.0 business targets.

The core systems were migrated simultaneously over a 48 hour period.

The project encompassed upgrading the platform for core banking suite of applications (FCR/FCC/Flex@R/Flex@C/Flex@RTGS). As part of this upgrade, we had migrated all systems from Windows 2003/Windows 2000 to Windows 2008 and also upgraded the Database from Oracle 9i to Oracle 11g, including other environmental software upgrades bringing in better performance and latest high availability technologies like Oracle RAC. We had also ensured FCR/FCC systems compatibility with IE8 and Direct Banking channels' compatibility with multiple browsers such as IE8, Google Chrome 16.0.912.63 and Safari 5.3.1.

Success:

This new platform went live on 26th January 2013. In the true YES Bank spirit this is a "first in its kind" project in the banking industry worldwide, where all the core systems were migrated simultaneously over a 48 hour period. There is no precedence to this migration project worldwide.