ING DIRECT puts core banking on x86

Issa said the solution is such a large change that attempting a calculation around return on investment is akin to trying to calculate a similar return on the difference in time between finding information in a library and searching it on Google.

Ben Issa, head of IT strategy, ING DIRECT.

“We tried to do the maths on ROI but the numbers are so huge it looks absurd and meaningless,” he said.

“The fact of the matter is, we can get more projects out. The real net result is we have changed the game.”

The project has enabled the bank to justify why it keeps a 170-strong system development and testing team in-house rather than offshoring as many of its competitors have.

“We can have our developers innovate,” Issa said.

“We can ask our developers to put their money where their mouth is - here is the capacity to show us, let’s see what you can build."

The bank has now formed DIRECT Labs, an initiative that encourages the entire team to conceive of and test radical new ideas - sometimes without authorisation.

“The way we deliver has changed fundamentally,” Issa said.

“A developer might say, in their own time out of curiosity, what would happen if I kill a database in the middle of a transaction?

“The old way, the cost of writing that test case if very expensive. Being innovative came at a cost to the organisation. But now, if it costs relatively nothing, why not try the idea out? Why not test if you can re-architect an application to gain a millisecond better response time?”

The new architecture means that multiple projects can be running and easily tested against each other in a sandbox before going into production.

DIRECT Labs doesn’t necessarily need to involve additional monetary rewards for developers, he said.

“Developers are still remunerated for the hours they do. A developer is truly rewarded by having their ideas come to fruition," he said.

"There is a reward when you walk into a contact centre and see people using your change, and they turn around and tell you that whoever wrote this is a legend.”

Time to dream

Issa said the solution has sparked a wave of new thinking within the development team.

The bank, he said, could, reconsider having cold standby servers synchronised for disaster recovery. An entire core banking system might in fact one day fit on a USB stick.

It might not be practical to expect that today, according to Issa, but to prepare for such a possibility isn’t so out of this world.

Issa concluded that too many organisations assume they need to pay large amounts of money to top-end software vendors to achieve the agility he is enjoying.

“Why does IT have to be so complicated?” he asked.

“Our architecture principle at ING DIRECT is to adopt proportionate to our scale. So we won't drop a supercomputer into our data centre any time soon.

“Do I really need highly complicated patch management software? Why? Is it because I have five SANs and six processor models? Perhaps I’m attacking the wrong problem.

“In IT, the biggest constraint is the speed of light,” he said. “That is the only frame of reference we play in. We don’t need to be constrained to how we worked yesterday. 

“The technology to solve many of these problems exists, what's missing is the audacity to do it.”