With 20 million customers and more than $185 billion in assets, a top 10 US banking institution relied on its longstanding relationship with Accenture to achieve its goals. The client wanted to realize significant cost savings, improve service quality, and maintain operational stability of its mission critical systems while mitigating the risks associated with global transition of operations.

In a three-year co-sourcing arrangement, Accenture assembled a global team from the US, India (Mumbai) and the Philippines (Manila) to provide support for critical Consumer Banking, Wholesale Banking and Corporate Information Systems applications. The arrangement leveraged Accenture global sourcing approach, through which we bring together the right mix of people, skills and capabilities to provide our clients with cost effective solutions and services, consistently high quality, reduced risk and rapid delivery.

As a member of the Manila team, Clark Noscal worked with the client to develop a detailed design to upgrade their mainframe system to a database model. He then sent the design to the team in Manila and now acts as the main liaison between the client and the Manila manager. Clark is in a role where he leverages his current skills and has developed new ones. “I further developed my mainframe skills, and, even though I’m a manager, I sometimes found it necessary to do some of the coding. You do whatever it takes to get the job done.”

Clark continues, “I had not previously worked on a hub-and-spoke architecture, so that was new for me. I also helped develop programs for the mainframe to communicate with the Java programs. That was quite interesting.”

Vivek D’Costa was a software engineer in the Delivery Centre in Mumbai. He worked on the Internet application for retail and corporate customers. “My team was primarily focused on testing. Our objective was to test every application and make sure it was working effectively before it was released. Since these are applications that are visible, our role was especially important. It required us to be on our toes at all times.”

In addition to testing, Vivek’s team provided production support. “Since our team was responsible for testing the application, we knew where to look if something was not working properly. We could definitely make recommendations on where to look and how to address the problem areas.”

Perhaps one of the most valuable experiences for all of the team members was working with a variety of people of different levels, skills and cultures across Accenture’s global network.

As of December 2002, Accenture has successfully transitioned maintenance and support responsibility for a broad range of mission critical applications, including Customer Information Systems, Teller, EDI, Check Reconciliation and Vault. Thanks to the outstanding collaboration between our teams in the US, Manila and Mumbai, Accenture has consistently sustained or improved quality and performance for these applications, as measured by service level and balanced scorecard metrics.

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