Turning banking upside down - Virgin Money Digital Bank is using the cloud to create a faster, more responsive, customer-centric bank of the future
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Case study
Turning banking upside down
Virgin Money Digital Bank is using the
cloud to create a faster, more responsive,
customer-centric bank of the future
Objective
Deliver personalized, on-demand
digital banking services based on
real-time insights from customer data
Approach
Validate public cloud suitability and
build a fully automated and secure AWS
environment, using a Minimum Viable
Cloud methodology
IT matters
• Maximized agility, security, and
manageability of the cloud
environment
• Proved effectiveness of analytics
required for a data-driven
banking platform
• Created a new, highly dynamic
cloud-aligned operating model Virgin Money is a financial Banking in the UK has traditionally been
an old-school industry, slow to change and
Business matters services brand used marked by entrenched business practices
• Proved the viability of a cloud platform
to improve customer insights by three independent and stable competition. Virgin Money is
pursuing a plan to buck this system. The
• Met aggressive timeline for rolling out brand licensees in bank says it is aiming to transform banking
new digital banking service
the United Kingdom, the same way successful technology
• Ensured compliance with regulatory platform businesses like eBay, Facebook, and
requirements such as GDPR Australia, and South Africa. Spotify have evolved their industries.
Virgin Money UK offers
The new venture, known as Virgin Money
savings, mortgages, credit Digital Bank (VMDB), will leverage real-time,
cards, current accounts, deep analysis of data to create a
customer-centric, digitally enabled service.
currency services, pensions, The service aims to “re-imagine the basics
investments, and protection of banking” by delivering new, on-demand,
targeted services based on real-time
products to over three insights it derives from customer data.
million customers across Services will include universal accounts,
money pools, and digital assistance. Plans
the country. call for a 2019 rollout with 200,000
customer sign-ups in the first year, and one
million by 2024.
Case study Industry Page 2
Virgin Money Financial services
“Working with CTP, we were able to produce an enterprise-class cloud
development platform in less than four months—less than 20 percent of
the time we estimated that it would have taken building the platform in its
existing onsite operating model.”
– Jem Walters, Director of Digital Enablement, Virgin Money
Demonstrating what components. The MVC passed multiple
third-party security audits to establish the
the cloud can do AWS platform as a secure environment for
To create the VMDB, Virgin Money future development.
needed to prove that the cloud could
The foundational services in the MVC
handle the large volumes of data necessary
addressed key concerns common to all
to enable their services. The bank
applications for highly regulated, enterprise
engaged Cloud Technology Partners, a
clients, including security, compliance,
Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, to
availability, manageability, transparency,
study the issue, create proofs of concept
and scalability, similar to the build-out of a
(POCs) for an analytics and Big Data
new data center. The MVC implementation
platform, and partner on a project to build
goes beyond those typical data center
out the cloud and data platforms.
capabilities to include “Defense in Depth”
level security, extensive security and
Could the cloud handle all the demands?
operations logging and monitoring, full
And could the bank stand up a new cloud
stack provisioning and configuration
environment in time to meet the aggressive
automation, cost management, and creation
rollout goal?
of a new cloud-aligned operating model
designed to manage a highly dynamic
VMDB brought in Cloud Technology
environment.
Partners (CTP) for a series of engagements
to help answer these questions, starting The new cloud platform is based on
with the build-out of a Minimum Viable CTP methodologies, AWS, and industry
Cloud (MVC). best practices to maximize the agility,
security, and manageability of the cloud
deployment. In addition to leveraging the
Creating a Minimum AWS extensive portfolio of services, CTP
Viable Cloud deployed technology from Trend Micro,
HashiCorp, Sumo Logic, Dome9, Chef,
Working with VMDB, CTP built a fully Jenkins, Atlassian, JFrog, and a variety of
automated deployment of an MVC on open-source tools.
AWS, addressing core infrastructure,
security, operations, and automationCase study Industry Page 3
Virgin Money Financial services
Building analytics build a graph database, generate graphs
of customer transactions, and look for
proof of concepts patterns that are fraudulent. As customer
Once the first set of approvals was secured, transactions reach high volumes, it’s harder
VMDB engaged CTP to work jointly with its to do in a transitional database. CTP tested
client analytics team to create five separate the system at one million users, using a
POCs dealing with issues surrounding the graph database management system.
Big Data environment. The bank set out to
In parallel, CTP tested out scenarios
assess the array of available analytics tools
comparing the bank’s ability to migrate
and models to demonstrate the value of a
part of an existing data warehouse onto the
data-driven banking platform. The VMDB-
cloud vs. building it from scratch. It took four
CTP team pushed through the POCs,
weeks to shift the data onto the cloud—a
validating the efficacy of the overarching
quarter of the time it would have taken to
analytics function and four separate
build in a traditional environment.
underlying use cases.
Finally, CTP tested the bank’s ability to
The most pressing POC involved the ability
control the flow of data and metadata.
to process advanced text-based analytics.
With all the regulatory requirements the
VMDB needed to prove it could build
bank faces—including new regulations,
machine-learning models, so it developed
such as the EU’s General Data Protection
a “topic model” based on data stored in an
Regulation (GDPR)—the bank needs to be
Amazon S3 cloud service. CTP ingested
able to extract the metadata from the data
the data, and then used a Latent Dirichlet
processing pipeline and create an end-to-end
Allocation (LDA) statistical model to show
view of the technical metadata. CTP used a
how documents can be categorized into
metadata management system to create a
different topics.
system that harvests metadata throughout
The second POC examined the use of the data pipeline, understands the data
graph databases. For instance, if the bank lineage, and does impact analyses.
wants to mine data based on fraud, it canCase study Industry
Virgin Money Financial services
Customer at a glance Clearing the way for A platform for the future
Solution implementation The financial services industry is a
Cloud-based, customer-centric digital
banking services Following the POCs, CTP, and the VMDB competitive business—and a slip-up in
client team partnered on a new project: planning or execution can set a bank back
HPE Pointnext services
• HPE Cloud Advisory and creating a business case for the cloud and years. Virgin Money Digital Bank is taking
Professional Services data components. They performed a cost a progressive approach, going all-in on
analysis and a high-level risk analysis report cloud in an effort to create a unique banking
to justify the final build-out. That project platform for the future. Working with CTP
concluded in December 2017, clearing the and other partners, VMDB is validating its
way for a third and final 18-month project to vision, removing risk and charting a new
implement the cloud and data strategy. course for success.
Throughout the multi-step process, AWS
validated the architecture and advised on Learn more at
further services, such as Service Catalog, AI, hpe.com/services/cloud
ML, Managed Services, and security best
practices. The AWS Services mix includes
multiple accounts and VPCs, VPN Gateway,
VPC Peering, IAM, Security Groups, KMS,
Encryption, Route 53, IGW, Directory
Services, CloudWatch, Config, CloudTrail,
Lambda, EC2, EMR, S3, and RDS.
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