Banking Experience Platform: A Digital All-in-One Solution for Ayvens Bank

Availability, scalability, resilience, security, and compliance

Availability, scalability, resilience, security, and compliance. In short, these are the key challenges facing every financial service provider today. Modern customers demand real-time access to their information, banking products, and money. Meanwhile, regulators and supervisors are regularly knocking on the door with new requirements and changes. Financial service providers must therefore offer an attractive and user-friendly product for their customers, with the flexibility to quickly respond to changes. That’s why Ayvens Bank chose the all-in-one solution of a Banking Experience Platform from Iquality.

Ayvens Bank (formerly LeasePlan Bank) is, in every way, a modern financial service provider. Over 280,000 customers in the Netherlands and Germany can manage their financial affairs quickly and effortlessly, whenever they want. Whether through the bank's online platform on the website or on the go with the convenient app. Customers are always in control of their savings. Quickly transferring money, dividing it into savings pots, or opening a fixed-term deposit—all accessible 24/7, in real time and securely. The bank is also constantly working to comply with the latest laws and regulations.

Seamless User Experience

The speed and flexibility with which Ayvens Bank can respond to the needs of modern consumers and regulators is not something that happens by chance. To ensure its excellent customer experience and robust compliance track record for the future, Ayvens Bank (still operating under the name LeasePlan Bank at the time) made a decisive move in 2018. The savings bank decided to migrate its entire IT environment to the Azure cloud. For this, Ayvens Bank relied on Iquality, which had previously developed the new banking environment and website. This was the first step toward creating a Banking Experience Platform. "As an online bank, we want to constantly innovate, quickly adapt, improve the user experience for our customers, and meet regulatory requirements," says Sander Frons, Director of Ayvens Bank. "By migrating to the cloud with the help of Iquality, we made all of this possible."

Advantages of Cloud Migration

Before Ayvens Bank moved to the cloud, the bank ran on servers and 'monolithic' software packages. In these 'monolithic' packages, all functionalities are tightly integrated and inseparable. Migrating to the cloud gave Ayvens Bank the ability to use each application as a separate building block. "These building blocks can be combined freely to create solutions for every digital need," explains Ronald Nieuwenhuis, Iquality Team Lead. "From our years of experience, we develop platforms from these building blocks that seamlessly meet the needs of financial service providers, their customers, and the involved regulators. We call this a customizable and scalable system—the Banking Experience Platform (BXP). The flexible CMS system from Sitecore plays a crucial role here, as do the innovative core banking cloud services from our trusted Dutch partner, Ohpen."

Banking Environment Always Up-to-Date

With Ayvens Bank's transition to the cloud, Ohpen took over the management of all 280,000 savings accounts. Ohpen has a large team of specialists constantly working on the latest technology and customer and regulatory demands. As a result, Ayvens Bank's new banking environment is always up-to-date, uses the latest technology, and complies with the newest regulations, ISO standards, and SOC industry standards. "Thanks to our long-standing partnership with Iquality, we are now perfectly complementary," says Rogier van Arkel, Director of Savings & Investments at Ohpen. "Together, we can now offer financial service providers a complete digital solution."

Insights into the Challenges of the Financial Sector

Thanks to the innovative Banking Experience Platform and the close collaboration with Iquality and Ohpen's experts, Ayvens Bank now directly responds to new customer needs, regulations, and technological opportunities. A recent example of this is the integration of a new cloud service for identity verification. Sander Frons explains: "With this, we've automated the majority of our internal verification processes. New customers now open a savings account within 6 minutes, and our verification costs have significantly decreased. The extensive experience of our dedicated Iquality team in developing digital solutions for the financial sector has been a real added value here."

Developing with Ease and Speed

The new Banking Experience Platform marked a significant step forward for Ayvens Bank. "Of course, we still keep a close eye on things," says Sander Frons, "but the ease and speed with which we can adapt to new laws and regulations with the Banking Experience Platform has alleviated many of our concerns. The implementation of new services or features for our customers can now be done in much less time—usually within a few weeks. Thanks to the close collaboration with Iquality and Ohpen, our team also has significant influence over the development process. The result is that we’ve become more agile: we can respond faster with digital solutions. As an online bank, this is essential."

Ready for the Future with State-of-the-Art Digital Infrastructure

Ayvens Bank is, in every sense, a modern financial service provider. The savings bank opted early on for a Banking Experience Platform in the cloud. This decision has generated a high return over the past years and was rewarded with the 'Best Use of Cloud' award at the Banking Technology Awards. "The modern consumer continuously raises the bar for financial services," notes Sander Frons. "The same goes for regulators and supervisors, who rightly set higher standards for data processing and security. We want to be ready for all parties. Thanks to our partnership with Iquality and Ohpen, Ayvens Bank is prepared for this challenging future."

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