Success Story

Digital Transformation of UAE’s Largest Bank through a customized Document Management System

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The First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB) is UAE’s largest bank offering customized banking solutions with its extensive range of products and services. Headquartered in Khalifa Business Park, Abu Dhabi, the bank’s international network spans 19 countries. It provides the global relationships, expertise, and financial strength to support local, regional and international firms seeking to do business at home and abroad.

Services Used:

Banking IT Services ECM Solutions

Business Situation

FAB had been maintaining and managing its records and accounts on an old version of a Document Management System (DMS). This system was used for scanning and storing thousands of important documents and account records containing highly sensitive and personal banking information.

However, this version of the system had some issues such as it used Documentum 6.5 and Captiva 6.0, technologies that had been inching towards end-of-life, the system lag when loading up scanning and indexing processes was very high, it supports very few document types and there was no backup plan for the system if its primary data center became unavailable or corrupted.

FAB’s need for digital transformation brought them to Daffodil. Brainstorming sessions with FAB allowed the Daffodil team to get a precise idea about the drawbacks of the existing system. The team boiled down FAB’s requirements to the following:

Upgrade the existing document management system’s underlying technologies for scanning and indexing.
Make the banking document-intensive processes more streamlined.
Implement a Disaster Recovery (DR) site to facilitate the recovery of the system infrastructure when needed.
Allow for more document types and organize the system for role-based access.

The Solution

Team Daffodil’s digital transformation experts conducted a deep analysis of each process involved in the existing DMS. Extensive research was carried out to find the best tools to ensure an optimal user experience and ultimately sharpen FAB’s competitive advantage in the market. The team reengineered the DMS with the following upgrades:

Revamped Document Management System

The Document Management (DM) software was upgraded to enhance the overall performance of the DMS. Documentum 6.5 was replaced with the Documentum 7.x version which provides tight control of document access and editing, with online access for authorized users. It allows integration with external systems through standard industry-supported APIs. Additionally, Documentum 7.x has very fast searching capabilities and is highly scalable, always prepared for FAB’s potential expansion plans.

A newer version of Captiva, Captiva 6.5 was used to automate the capture of high volumes of banking information and transform it into actionable data. This version leads the industry in processing speed and recognition accuracy. It also speeds up the extraction and classification of over 28 varied document types. This reduces backlogs, speeds up backend processing, and eliminates costs involved in finding and removing manual errors. With these two software applications, most of the document extraction, access, and management processes were automated.

Streamlined Processes

About 150 document-intensive business processes were automated for enhancing the overall management of the bank’s functions. This improved the user-friendliness of these operations on the DMS. Some of these major processes were:

Credit approval,
Managing equities and expenses,
Loan operations,
Wealth management,
Check clearing, generating trust receipts, and more.

Disaster Recovery Site

Before creating the crucial DR site for FAB, the Daffodil team wanted to explicitly understand the business parameters in line with their recovery requirements. The first parameter was the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) or the frequency of data backups and the second one was the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) or the amount of permissible system downtime. While RPO was optimized to provide the most up-to-date recoverable data, the RTO was minimized so that the business impact of a system outage or cyber attack would be negligible.

The DR site allows FAB to provide customers with uninterrupted service which is the most crucial factor for success in the banking industry. This is a highly affordable and efficient disaster recovery option for FAB that provides up-to-date data and service availability to customers without any downtime.

Other Technological Advancements

The object-oriented architecture of Documentum 7.x utilizes browser technology as the presentation layer. This helps produce user-friendly HTML widgets and databound tables and lists which enhances user experience.
InputAccel is used for scanning, indexing, and storing the banking info in a centralized repository. This minimizes processing errors, improves data accuracy, and accelerates business processes.
The core banking software known as T24 allows for quick scalability using cloud platforms as well as traditional on-premise infrastructure.
The DMS is browser and platform-agnostic. It is compatible with multiple desktop browsers such as Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.
The system is lightweight, making the scanning and indexing processes extremely fast.

The Impact

The scalable, high-performance DMS delivered by Daffodil was upgraded with the latest underlying management software as per the requirements of FAB. All the processes were made more user-friendly, while user-access management enhanced security. The newly implemented DR site will ensure business continuity with uninterrupted banking services. Additionally, the system provides for immense cost reduction and almost zero system downtime. The overall solution is expected to help FAB maintain its position as a business leader in UAE’s banking sector.