FNB's Decision Management Journey:

Transforming IT towards sustainable

business agility on system Z

Business Process & Decision

Management - Actionable Insights
with Rules & Decision Management

Avsharn Bachoo

2014 IBM Corporation

Company overview
The oldest bank in South Africa formed in 1838
Listed on the South African Stock Exchange and the Namibian
Stock Exchange
One of the largest financial institutions in South Africa providing
banking and insurance to retail, commercial, corporate and public
sector customers

2
Business Problem
FNB was facing increased business pressure due to expansion,
regulation and consumer demand
The old rules engine:
was inflexible
could not effectively apply analytics to take advantage of Big
Data

3
Business Problem
The old rules engine was not integrated into FNBs mainframe

4
Business Problem
Rapid international expansion 2009
Multiple developers could not work simultaneously on the engine
Therefore, forced to create instances of the engine per country to
allow for project throughput
Affordability rules (best practice) replicated in each instance of engine
Poor reusability
Testing inefficiencies as each instance of the engine had to be tested

South Africa +Country A +Country B +Country C

Pre bureau Pre bureau Pre bureau Pre bureau
Post bureau Post bureau Post bureau Post bureau
Affordability Affordability Affordability Affordability
Cheque Cheque Cheque Cheque
Card Card Card Card
Business Requirement
FNB needed an engine that was:
Agile in order to rapidly cope with new regulations and business
conditions
Adaptive to seamlessly fit into the existing complex FNB
architecture

6
Business Requirement

Reduction in time taken to code, develop and deploy rules

Ability to deploy rules and parameters from a centralised source
to multiple distributed environments with central control
Ability to execute rules/decisioning real-time through a single
unit of work
Decisioning engine integration into FNB Mainframe Cobol
environment

7
Business Requirement
Shift focus from Business Rules to Decision Management
Not credit rules specific
Incorporate fraud (both application and transactional)
Loyalty program incorporation
Cater for prototyping, model driven requirements and reverse
engineering of specification
Manage business decisions in natural language
Decouple development and business decision change lifecycles
Single version of the Truth
Maintainable with a Center of Competency model
Focus on decisions that need to change often and quickly

8
Technical requirement

Solution needed the capability for current and future integration

into FNBs
Warehouses
Data mining systems
Analytical and modeling systems

Support and integrate with FNBs existing mainframe

technologies:
Hogan Cobol
JBOSS /Tomcat and Linux
zLinux

Support a role-based security model

9
Selection criteria that led to ODM

.
Product Technology Interface Seamless
environment Integration with
FNB mainframe
FICO Blaze Advisor JVM or .NET Proprietary API or Message switch
Web Service

IBM ODM zOS, JVM Cobol, XML and Direct

JAVA API
Jboss Enterprise Jboss Middleware JAVA API Message switch
BRMS
Apama JVM or .NET JAVA, C, C++, .NET Message switch

Experian JVM JAVA, C Message switch

Powercurve

SAP NetWeaver JVM JAVA, ABAP Message switch

Oracle Business Oracle Fusion XML, JAVA or Oracle Message switch

Rules Middleware
10
What led to ODM product selection
Improved separation of business logic from mainframe

Java flexibility scalability run within or out of mainframe

FNB has a low maturity in the generation of requirements

IDE Integration with industry standards (e.g. Eclipse)

11
What led to ODM product selection
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) driven

12
What led to ODM product selection
Old engine had too many nested if then statements
ODM relies on more atomic rules

13
Selection criteria that led to ODM
Forrester Research 2007

14
Selection criteria that led to ODM
Gartner magic quadrant 2014

15
The Smarter Process Adoption Journey
Journey

Identify Business Succeed with an Establish a Adopt within

Stage

Challenge & Value Initial Project Program LOB/Enterprise

Define the Accelerate Scale Delivery Scale Business

Customers Goals &

Opportunity Business Value Capability Impact

Context

Established business Deliver your first Increase scope & impact Line-of-business /
priorities & objectives. solution successfully. of mission. Enterprise focus.
Build a plan for your Build foundational Establish critical mass of Align strategy and
BPM/BRM skills & platform skills. platform skills. execution goals.
potential. Use early win to foster Establish governance & Mature platform skills &
new adoption. delivery consistency. solution discipline.
Value

Time
 Travelling through FNB journey
Decide Prepare Proove Plan Deliver Scale
2013 2014 2015
Q4 Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q1 Q2

Product
Selection

QWP Aggregations Support

Go Live

Smart Blocks Support

Production-
ready

Personal Banking Support

Support

Go Live

Projects Monthly Events

Program Infrastructure
Governance

Center Of Excellence
Expand across BUs
17
Technical Milestones
1. Proof integration with mainframe (through COBOL)
2. Deliver value consistently across various technical environments
Batch / real-time
Mainframe / distributed
Same rule services running consistently
3. Address change and complexity by revamping a strategic system
Not compromising business agility; independent decision services
combined through composite services
Preserving a manageable governance model; avoiding too many fine
grain services across functions / countries
4. Expand and spread across the company (ongoing)
Monthly events, ...
Commercial, First Rand Group, ...
5. Explore additional value gain through related technologies (future)
Decision Server Insights, ...

18
Design Principles Applied
Start small, migrate as-is first (function)
Replace SMG on a confined, yet critical, application: aggregations
Dare to revamp for more business agility
Personal Banking reorganized in finer grain, independent
business decisions, that are shared across countries
Pre-Bureau / Post-Bureau -> Scoring, Cross-sell, Fraud, ....
Capitalize and share good practices, skills, infrastructure,
knowledge and resources through a Center of Excellence
Explore new benefits offered by Decision Server Insights (future)
Migrating from a batch-oriented culture to a real-time, events-
driven and insightful architecture
Considered for fraud and managing daily events over time

19
Program Management Principles Applied
Run multiple streams in parallel
Agree on the interfaces (copybooks) as a starting point, then
Dynamic Decisioning (rules) / CMS (COBOL) working in parallel
Deliver a first quick win fast
Rely on existing requirements (as-is migration)
Reduce design to macro-design only
Start prototyping as early as possible
Apply Agile Business Rule Development methodology
Build and manage a delivery roadmap
Grow skills within the team over time
Capitalize skills and best practices in a Center of Excellence
Spare some time to support operations
Delegate rule changes to the business users over time
Evangelize across the organization for a wider adoption
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Infrastructure setup
7 4
Decision Center Harvest
ruleapp
1 archive ( through ant scripts)

Rule Designer

2
(eg SVN)

Rule Designer

3 5 6
Rule
Execution
Rule Designer zRES zRES
Server (RES)
(zRES on z/OS or RES
on distributed)

Dev QA / INT PROD

21
Lessons learnt
Productivity Units Improvement
FNB adoption of IBM way of working
40

35

30

25

20

15

10

0
41104 41166 41227 41347 41408 41469 41531 41592 41712 41773 41834 41896 41957
41074 41135 41196 41319 41378 41439 41500 41561 41684 41743 41804 41865 41926

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Lessons learnt
Performance tests

STATS on Dev Existing FNB Rule ODM

engine

Number of records 543616 543616

Total TCB CPU Time 0.11 (General processor 0.0 ** in zIIP processor
MIPs used) (Within System Z hardware)
Total service units 22101K 12411K
(Recovery based on this, less is
better)

** Additional tests ongoing in

conjunction with IBM

23
Future Plans
Better leverage data through analytics
Netezza Integration
Expand the scope of decision management
Loyalty program
Pricing Engine
Explore new value gains through technology
Call centre prioritisation of customer calls

24
Thank You
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