Nedbank CIO Fred Swanepoel chuckles when asked how many times he and other executives at the bank have had the 'when are you getting an app' question put to them.
For Nedbank, it's been a two-year journey to get the bank's App Suite to market, but Swanepoel makes the point that it's not simply about payments. Its launch in September follows shortly after rival Standard Bank's June release and is more than a year after FNB shipped its first version.
"From the very beginning, we've said the big challenge here is not only to get the payments and the commerce going, but also to make sure it's in a secure container. We have spent two years making sure we have the right answer from a security perspective."
The app was launched to the bank's staff in June as part of a deliberate strategy to elicit broad feedback before launch to customers.
"We launched this to staff and have taken their feedback to tweak it so we have a roaring success when we go to market," says Swanepoel.
He admits that in the past, the team's take would have been to fix it in the next release in a quarter's time. Not anymore. The tweaks and fixes translated into multiple builds internally before the bank's customers saw 'version 1' in app stores.
"Try version 11!" he laughs.
We launched this to staff and have taken their feedback to tweak it so we have a roaring success when we go to market.
It hasn't been plain sailing, though. Swanepoel admits to challenges when developing for BlackBerry devices. It's not just a Nedbank problem. App developers the world over have traditionally struggled when coding for BlackBerry's legacy operating systems. But being available on the platform is a necessity, given that three-quarters of the bank's base uses BlackBerry.
Perhaps the most important gain of all while building the App Suite is the transformation it has effected in the bank's development processes.
"You have to have certain fixed milestones," says Swanepoel, "but certainly from a look-and-feel and feature perspective, it has to be very iterative."
Top management has realised that in order to be agile, you need to be innovative.
He offers the example of previously only ever rolling out IT changes over weekends.
"When you play in this space, forget about that."
The iterative nature of app development has helped the bank 'think about being more agile in the larger projects'.
There's a new term that has taken hold internally. Swanepoel's teams talk about "time-to-value... from the idea phase to implementation, how short can you make it? How do you chop up chunky things to deliver value quicker?"
The App Suite is also, in many ways, a manifestation of what Swanepoel has been focused on since being appointed four years ago. He told Brainstorm in February 2009 that his main objective was to get IT and business to work together.
"It's played out very well for us," he says of the plan. Swanepoel speaks about the 'magnificent engagement' between the bank's four clusters (retail, business, corporate, wealth) and IT. It's meant the appointment of technology officers in those businesses, and he has re-centralised the bank's systems development.
"If you look at the bank's strategy now, especially in the retail space, you'll see a very strong focus on what we call IT-enabled business process re-engineering (the industrialisation of manual processes). This not only saves costs, but brings you lots of advances in client service as well."
All of this, Swanepoel says, was ultimately driven by the board saying: "IT is hugely important in the bank's life. What is the business doing to give effect to this? What new role does IT have to play?"
The bank, like most organisations, had gone through a period where IT simply served the business.
The board requested that a benchmark programme be done on IT. What emerged impressed Swanepoel. "From an effectiveness and efficiency perspective, the department was world-class.
"This took the debate away from the availability of IT, and helped the bank elevate the discussion."
What was lacking, adds Swanepoel, was the 'thought-leadership' provided by IT.
It's since put in place a focused team that looks at emerging technologies and how these can be leveraged in the bank. Swanepoel and Ingrid Johnson, who runs retail and business banking, head up an 'innovation forum' internally. The aim is to provide a way for ideas to be discovered and used in a more structured way.
"The change within the bank has been visible," Swanepoel admits. "Top management has realised that in order to be agile, you need to be innovative. This is the secret to success, especially in a competitive environment."
The board also recognised that, given the success he's had in getting IT and business to work together, Swanepoel's teams should spearhead the project to upgrade the level of business analysis in the bank. This had been identified as a stumbling block to innovating faster.
Being part of the Old Mutual group (it owns 52% of Nedbank), along with sister company Mutual & Federal (wholly owned), brings with it additional benefits.
The obvious opportunities have been in large-scale procurement. The Project Merlot network-outsourcing deal (which ran for six years from 2005) achieved savings of well over R1 billion. Its successor, Mercury, which was awarded to Dimension Data, Telkom and Nashua in August 2011, will save at least a further R840 million for the group off the Merlot baseline. Swanepoel says there are similar synergies to be found in areas like renegotiating enterprise licences for software.
"There's been no top management directive," he admits, although the three companies have moved a lot closer.
"We get our teams together, with IT top management meeting several times a year."
He adds that he meets with his counterpart at Old Mutual, Richard Boynett, "if not every month, then every second month.
"Our people come up with ideas. When it makes sense, we give them the go-ahead, and that's how many of the things that have given us huge synergies have started.
"It's like a flywheel, gathering momentum. As people have successes, they will want to seek more."
First published in the November 2012 issue of ITWeb Brainstorm magazine.
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