Asseco has supported integration of Bank Pekao and Idea Bank systems
Bank Pekao S.A., supported by the Asseco Poland team, has successfully completed the fastest integration of universal commercial banks on the Polish market. The institution needed just 10 months to prepare for the transfer of customer data from the former Idea Bank S.A. to Bank Pekao’s operating systems, which was completed during the migration weekend on November 19-22. Since then, Idea Bank clients have been able to benefit from Pekao's full infrastructure and offer. Asseco's role was to create tools automating the migration and data transformation, integrated with a proprietary application supporting the coordination of migration team works and consolidated reporting on the progress, completeness and quality of the migration.
This was the first bank integration conducted from start to finish during the pandemic, which required developing a hybrid approach to the implementation of work. Teams involved in the project worked remotely and were dispersed throughout Poland. Preparations for data migration, within the scope of Asseco's responsibility, lasted 7 months. Considering the scope of the Idea Bank's migrated IT architecture, encompassing nearly 200 IT systems, and the team's ambition to automate the process as much as possible, the project schedule was extremely challenging. Moreover, the integration was an unusual undertaking due to the logistics of the migration weekend itself. During this 26-hour period, over 400 people flawlessly completed several thousand tasks precisely arranged in one correct sequence.
Since the migration weekend we have been fully operating as one bank, and the clients of the former Idea Bank fully benefit from Pekao's infrastructure and systems. This was the last stage of the merger process. 220 thousand corporate clients and about 50 thousand individual clients of the former Idea Bank have gained access to products and services, including those that had not been available in the former Idea. We appreciate our cooperation with Asseco whose support, despite the challenges posed by the pandemic and remote work mode, helped us achieve the fastest integration of financial institutions on the Polish banking sector. The integration was a success," said Jacek Trzynski, Integration Project Leader, Bank Pekao.
In order to successfully implement such a complex project, Asseco has developed dedicated tools - Asseco Migration Platform (AMP). AMP consists of three integrated applications. A parameterized migration engine responsible for online data transformation. A reconciliation engine responsible for the execution of control procedures at each stage of migration, from extraction from the source systems to loading into the target systems. The third component of AMP is a migration console, which is a graphical interface for the engine operator and migration participants. The scope of functionality of the console includes the coordination of tasks of migration participants and ongoing reporting on the progress of work or the completeness and quality of data migration. Moreover, the console structured the decision-making processes of the merger business leaders during the migration weekend.
The tools built made the migration process effective and transparent. We wanted them to be not only efficient but also user-friendly for the end users. Consequently, all the solutions used during the migration period successfully supported the team in monitoring the progress and quality of migration and automated the performed tasks, thereby reducing the operational risk," said Anna Stepanów, Manager, Asseco Business Consulting Team, Asseco Poland.
From the beginning we knew that the foundation for the success of this project had to be an exceptional team. We were aware that the challenges we would face would require exceptional commitment and unconventional solutions. We managed to build a team of enthusiasts, integrating specialists from several departments of Asseco, for whom overcoming the so-called "extra mile" became something absolutely natural. Thanks to them, we can all be proud that we took part in the fastest, first remotely implemented and most automated bank integration in Poland,” added Grzegorz Paskudzki, Team Leader Asseco Business Consulting, Asseco Poland.
Merging two organizations is an operation that requires care and the involvement of many teams. In technical, IT, and communication terms, everything must be carried out at the highest level so that the customers experience inconvenience as little as possible. Over six months of intensive work of the entire team and supporting the process with Asseco's tools helped minimize the unavailability of mobile and Internet banking.