Virgin Money scales workloads 9x and empowers business analysts

Company overview

Virgin Money UK takes a digital-first approach to serving its 6.5 million consumer and business customers across Great Britain with a leading technology platform geared to deliver exceptional customer experiences across products including checking, mortgages, retirement funds, investments and insurance.

Virgin Money supports that vision with innovation in its back-end IT infrastructure, including its use of Redwood automation software for more than two decades. In 2013, Virgin Money became an early adopter of Redwood’s cloud-native Business Process Automation (BPA), building on successes it achieved with Redwood’s on-premises solution.

Business challenges

Virgin Money first deployed Redwood’s on-premises solution around 2000, replacing a legacy system for workload automation and job scheduling. Redwood delivered the reliable automation and scalability that Virgin Money needed amid growth in customer transactions though a homegrown customer management system (CMS).

Virgin Money achieved transformational improvements with the Redwood’s on-premises solution. For example, it reduced overnight processing time for customer transactions by 80%, from 11 hours to just 2.5, without errors and interruptions suffered with the previous system.

In fact, Redwood performed so well that Virgin Money kept delaying updates to the on-premises solution in favor of higher priorities, ending up several versions behind.

Solution

As part of a data warehouse refresh project, Virgin Money opted to migrate to Redwood’s cloud-native BPA solution rather than updating the on-premises software in order to eliminate the distraction of ongoing maintenance and ensure high levels of uptime.

Results

Virgin Money has realized remarkable results with its migration to cloud-based BPA that save the company time and money while supporting exceptional customer experiences.

• Scaled to a 9x increase in transactions: Since the cloud migration, Virgin Money has seen its volume of customer transactions soar from 7 million to 60 million a day, up nearly 9x. Process executions have risen from 5,000 to 40,000 a day. BPA hasn’t missed a beat.
• Empowered business analysts: For Arnold and his team, a big benefit of the cloud upgrade is the new ability to empower semi-technical business analysts with limited self-service development access. As a result, the Redwood user base at Virgin Money has expanded from five IT staff in the on-premises days to about 40 IT and business users of the cloud solution. Taking advantage of ease of use in the low-code platform, business analysts are able to directly apply their deep business knowledge without going back and forth with IT on specifications. Meanwhile, the IT workload is trimmed to allow more focus on innovation.
• Accelerated initiatives with ease of use: Templates, reusability and visual drag-and-drop process chains in BPA equip both IT and business analysts to quickly move automation initiatives from the drawing board into production.
• Adapted to changing application environment: Flexibility in BPA helped Virgin Money with a large-scale transition from the homegrown CMS built around Oracle Forms. This CMS supported areas including contact management, billing, life insurance underwriting, deposit accounts and investments. Now, Virgin Money has moved those functions to about eight third-party service providers, with BPA helping the company pivot as needed.
• Managed complex interdependencies: The shift from a single in-house system to multiple external partners introduced a host of new and complex interdependencies that are seamlessly orchestrated with Redwood, helping Virgin Money deliver quality customer experiences.
• Strengthened auditability and alerting: Arnold’s team is also benefiting with auditability that documents any changes made, by whom and with advanced alerting capabilities in the cloud solution that didn’t exist in the on-premises version. Finely grained configuration lets Virgin Money customize alerts for specific events, environments and audiences.