Driving faster, smarter, more consistent and more efficient decision-making

As First National Bank (FNB) expanded its business activities within South Africa and in neighboring countries, it found that its decision-support systems were not running optimally in the face of increasing demands from internal users, customers, and regulators. The inflexibility of existing systems was making it slow and costly to adapt rules to meet new requirements, hindering business agility. The existing solution could not support different sets of rules for each country, so FNB was forced to construct multiple instances of the rules engine. This implied the costly replication of rules and associated redevelopment and testing work, and also meant that changes made by head office took too long to propagate out to the subsidiary countries. With up to 40 changes to shared central rules each month, each of which had to be separately tested and deployed across ten countries, the existing approach at FNB was clearly inefficient in development terms.

Established in 1838, First National Bank (FNB) is the oldest bank in South Africa and one of the region’s largest financial institutions. FNB provides banking and insurance products to personal, commercial, corporate and public-sector customers. Like other banks, FNB relies on shared business rules and assessment tools to ensure that it strikes the optimal balance between risk and opportunity in all operations. As it expanded its business activities both within South Africa and in neighboring countries, FNB found that its decision-support systems were not running optimally in the face of increasing demands from internal users, customers and regulators.