Wipro is helping a UK-based financial services group realize its goal of over £1.7 billion annual cost savings by 2014.

Client Background

The client is one of the 'Big Four' South African banks with a global presence, operating across 38 countries, 20 of which are outside the sub-continent. The bank functions in key financial centers across Europe, the Americas and Asia.

Increasing competition and fast-evolving customer needs have resulted in banks and financial institutions seeking technology support to upgrade existing products and services and launch new ones. These new launches need to be done with in the shortest possible time for the banks to stay ahead of competition. Testing of products thus assumes a high level of criticality, as it cuts the risk of application failure and provides for a better customer experience.

The Opportunity

The customer sought to bring in greater efficiencies into its testing function by enhancing automation and slashing the cycle time. Besides systems integration testing, the customer also sought support for a dedicated test environment that would lead to improved productivity, greater efficiencies and a streamlined test process. Some of the major challenges included:

• Shortage of leading edge IT skills on client location
• Lack of standardized processes across the enterprise, impairing the testing efficiencies
• Inadequate test governance as a result of multiple vendors providing testing services
• Lack of measurability of test effectiveness at an aggregate level
• Limited automation of tools leading to prolonged test cycles

Wipro was presented with the opportunity of creating a system integration testing environment for the customer's retail banking portfolio. The engagement involved dedicated testing support that would lead to productivity improvements, better efficiencies and a streamlined testing process.

Wipro partnered with the client to provide comprehensive testing & support services. Wipro planned a multi-phase transition for the client, covering six portfolios in the personal & business Banking (PBB) division comprising around 140 applications. Wipro used a Core-Flex model with quarterly forecasts for sizing the team to manage peaks and troughs in demand, thus optimizing capacity and reducing costs.

Business Impact

Wipro's testing and support services transformed the client's retail banking portfolio, with a positive impact across various business functions. Other benefits include:

• Improved the time-to-market by providing better testing quality that shortened cycle time
• Reduced the client's testing team size resulting in 19% productivity improvement
• Improved production quality and reduced the chances of failure arising from poor testing quality
• Significantly improved the maturity of business processes, quality orientation and process capabilities
• Provided robust MIS reporting - greater transparency in upstream/downstream status reporting
• Improved requirement traceability, test prioritization, defect logging and tracking as a result of quality center (QC) dashboard integration
• Created reusable assets through automation to aid future regression needs

Mitigated capacity fluctuations through productivity enablers and initiatives such as cross-skilling, deep skilling, knowledge capture, trainings, etc., to help reduce the impact of upstream efficiency issues.