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In 2017, First Gulf Bank and National Bank of Abu Dhabi merged to create First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB) to become the largest bank in the UAE and the second largest in the Middle East. With 60 banks in the region serving a population of 9 million, more challenging regulatory and capital demands are emerging, setting the scene for a series of merger activity.
Following the commercial merger of the two banks, the Springboard programme was launched to complete the full integration of the heritage businesses. Both banks consolidated their source systems onto the latest Temenos T24 core banking system, within a brand new datacentre.
PwC were chosen as the Consulting third party to lead on the Event design and provide the Command and Control expertise. ICEFLO was chosen by the bank as the tool of choice to plan and manage the rehearsals and eventual cutover. An ambitious programme was launched with a target completion date in early December 2018.
Senior Manager, First Abu Dhabi Bank
The newly formed bank had traditionally worked from Microsoft Project plans when doing any complex cutovers, and whilst this method was useful for compiling the initial data, it was evident that a more appropriate tool was required as the detailed planning began.
Moreover, as this was a highly complex event, and critical to concluding the merger activities, a solution that would closely monitor progress was imperative to protect the bank against potential risks.
A merger of this magnitude was a significant undertaking for the bank and third parties involved, and was to be delivered in an ambitious timescale. In integrating both banks' systems and applications over a single weekend, the migration of all data into a new datacentre with new infrastructure, as well as deploying application upgrades was a huge challenge.
ICEFLO was chosen to mitigate the risks around the live cutover, but also to facilitate the detailed planning required. With 65 separate work streams across both technology and business, the complexity of inter-related activities could be handled with ICEFLO’s dependency management features.
Hosted initially in MPP files, the ICEFLO team were able to support the banks in importing and restructuring all the data in ICEFLO. A series of closely scheduled rehearsals were to be delivered, with refinements applied before the next rehearsal run. In addition, the regulatory authorities were monitoring the results of rehearsals, looking at ICEFLO evidence to ensure the risks were minimised.
With teams dispersed across multiple buildings, adoption of ICEFLO had to be carefully managed to ensure that all end users had the correct level of education before being permitted to access the data within ICEFLO.
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