Customer Success Stories 1/4

Metro Bank fi nds agile digitalsolutions

“Our USP is all about service and convenience for our customers, That’s why we have stores (we call them stores, not branches) – they open late, they open almost every day of the year, and we’re all about service.”

How Metro Bank improved its digital products and services, and built a development team along the way

Metro Bank launched in the UK in 2010, not long after the global fi nancial crisis, and was the fi rst new high street bank in Britain in over 100 years. It employs approximately 3,000 colleagues, a number that increases by an average of 500 a year. The full-service bank has over a million customer accounts and is showing signifi cant growth.

Alongside its growth plans lies a passion to enhance its digital proposition, and this is what occurred recently over the course of 19 months. Key to the success of Metro Bank’s investment focus were improvements across its mobile offering, as well as a new commercial internet banking platform.

Metro Bank is able to respond to customer needs incredibly quickly. It achieves this by fi nding an optimal mix between state-of-the-art technology, such as the Backbase platform, and through optimizing internal teams to work in an agile way, focused on quick results instead of “big bang” releases.

David YoungChief Technology Offi cer at Metro Bank

Metro Bank Key Facts

Metro Bank is the fi rst new high street bank to open in the UK for over 100 years.

Recently named ‘Most Trusted Financial Provider’ and Best Mobile Banking App.

Technology investment in 2017: £55 million

“[...] another great feature of the platform – you’re not locked in to using inbuilt functionality.”

What did Metro Bank want to achieve? Metro Bank’s technology approach is to be as fl exible, agile and as fast-moving as possible, to consistently meet customer needs. The bank previously used a digital platform it wasn’t completely happy with, primarily because it wasn’t particularly fl exible, nor did it deliver what customers wanted in terms of a specifi c level of service. In fact, it had different platforms for each digital channel.

The decision was made to deprecate the platform, and so began the search for a best-in-class omni-channel solu-tion, where the bank could host all of its digital channels. It was a key requirement: a lightweight presentation layer platform fl exible enough to adapt to what Metro Bank wanted to achieve.

After looking at a number of vendor solutions, Metro Bank used Gartner as well as its own network and found that the Backbase Digital Banking Platform could provide what the bank was looking for in terms of light weight and fl exibility. Due diligence considerations included fi nding technology that would stand the test of time, and provide maximum fl exibility to meet customer needs.

“With other solutions, you buy the entire technology stack from a single vendor, and it’s all very tightly integrated,” says David Gould, Director of Architecture and Technology Solutions at Metro Bank. “We wanted this solution to

“One of the most important things was about choosing a company that had a culture that was similar to us. When we sat down with the Backbase team, we were very confi dent they shared our customer-centric approach to things.”

integrate with other systems in our core banking model, via web services on our enterprise service bus, so we’ve got a loosely coupled architecture that’s horizontally scalable, and the Backbase DBP fi tted right in there.”

Another important factor in Metro Bank choosing to partner with Backbase was early signs of business and personality synergy.

David YoungChief Technology Offi cer at Metro Bank

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What was achieved?

The fi rst product off the stack was a new commercial internet banking proposition. It was primarily built for a desktop use case, but was also built in a way that was device-responsive for iPads and mobile devices. Metro Bank wanted this for its commercial customers, who would have heavy transactional banking needs, and to make domestic and international payments. It was launched in November 2016, and took about 19-20 months from beginning to end.

The bank did a lot of work with the Backbase team to develop the commercial banking product, designing and building many custom widgets together. This sharing of innovation led to Backbase being able to use and reuse new widgets for the benefi t of other clients.

“Our use of the inbuilt widgets was relatively lightweight because our requirements always exceeded them,” says David Gould. “The widgets that currently make up that commercial product set of widgets on the Backbase platform was heavily developed in conjunction with us. A lot of the retail widgets we built for the mobile app were custom built, which is another great feature of the platform – you’re not locked in to using inbuilt functionality. You can choose to work outside of those core sets, so it works well.”

Metro Bank made the decision to implement the Backbase Digital Banking Platform because it could be used across multiple platforms, and used it again as part of its new mobile app, which was launched for retail and small business customers in February 2017.

Aside from the innovations achieved during a highly successful period of collaboration, Metro Bank credits Backbase with helping it build a digital delivery team of its own. The bank now has an end-to-end digital delivery function, from UR/UX, right through to LiveOPs and DevOps.

“This was the fi rst project we did in an agile way,” says David Young. “We have a team in place now, which is, along with the platform itself, probably one of our proudest achievements. We built a delivery machine as a result of this project, and did it with Backbase’s help.”

“We built a delivery machine as a result of this project, and did it with Backbase’s help.”

What does this mean for Metro Bank? The Backbase Digital Banking Platform has helped Metro Bank in providing a scalable service its commercial customers will benefi t from the most. New, powerful functionality is now available, such as being able to scale

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to thousands and thousands of transactions, searchthrough them quickly, and present the results neatly and efficiently onscreen. “Other platforms would have struggled with that,” says David Gould. “We’ve been impressed with how the Backbase Digital Banking Platform has been able to cope with these challenges.”

Metro Bank can now take on bigger customers with more complex requirements, which inevitably will enable the business to grow. The bank looks at things very differently to other banks, in that it doesn’t look at profit per customer, nor return on investment. Its most important metric across the entire bank is its Net Promoter Score, which it has been tracking for a long time for retail and small business customers, and is now tracking for commercial customers.

“Our Net Promoter Scores are off the charts for what you’d expect, and achieving high numbers reflect what we’re here to do, and that’s what we’re driven by,” says David Young. “Profit and similar metrics are output measures for us – they are the results of doing a good job rather than the things that drive us.”

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“Backbase is a good partner for us. It’s been a success story. It’s been a lot of hard work from a lot of people to get to where we are right now. We’re very happy with the partner we’ve chosen. Two years on from making the decision to work with Backbase, we’re confident we made the right choice.”

David YoungChief Technology Officer at Metro Bank

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