Bendigo & Adelaide Bank embraces AI for tech modernisation

Bendigo and Adelaide Bank has partnered with MongoDB to modernise its core banking technology using MongoDB Atlas and generative AI.

This initiative aims to reduce costs, automate migration tasks, and decrease developer overhead, allowing the bank to focus on customer-oriented innovations.

The modernisation initiative has greatly benefited Bendigo and Adelaide Bank by reducing development time required to migrate core banking applications off legacy systems by up to 90%. Additionally, costs have been slashed to a tenth of what traditional migrations would incur, facilitating the bank's target of migrating 50% of its critical workloads to the cloud by the end of the year.

In less than three months, the bank modernised its Agent Delivery System, a legacy retail banking application, onto MongoDB Atlas. The Agent Delivery System is used in communities to provide digital banking functionality through non-bank businesses such as newsagents or pharmacies. Previously, the system was run on a legacy relational database, which presented challenges in data management and flexibility. The transition to MongoDB was significantly expedited thanks to MongoDB Relational Migrator and generative AI-assisted modernisation tools.

Through this collaboration, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank has automated numerous repetitive developer tasks. AI-powered automation has notably reduced the time for running application test cases from over 80 hours to just five minutes. Andrew Cresp, Chief Information Officer at Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, stated, "This migration was an enormous step forward in our transformation journey and a perfect marriage of people smarts and tech smarts. It's an investment in our customers. Now, our lean, highly skilled team can ask MongoDB Atlas and the generative AI tooling MongoDB's Professional Services team built for us to do really smart things, leaving our developers free to focus on other ways they can deliver great outcomes for our customers."

The bank has adopted a new microservices architecture, enabling better data integration and establishing a robust API ecosystem for seamless data flow among the bank's applications, third parties, and consumers. The use of MongoDB Atlas provides high security and reliability and supports the bank with a unified platform for managing real-time operational data.

To carry out the migration, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank used MongoDB Relational Migrator, a tool designed to mitigate time, cost, and risks frequently associated with cloud migrations. This tool facilitated codebase analysis, service decomposition, and application refactoring, ensuring a secure and efficient transition. MongoDB Professional Services also developed custom generative AI tooling, including tailored scripts and prompts to streamline the modernisation process through automated integration testing and code generation.

Simon Eid, Senior Vice President, APAC at MongoDB, remarked, "It's important that MongoDB empowers its customers to modernise with applications that are not just future-ready, but future-defining. This is paramount for financial institutions, who need to transform quickly and take advantage of advancements like generative AI to best serve their customers. Applying the power of AI to Bendigo and Adelaide Bank's migration process was game-changing."

Cresp hinted at future plans, saying, "We've started by modernising our most critical applications, and next, we intend to tackle a number of other outdated legacy applications across the bank, putting us on track to meet our target of 50 percent of our critical workloads in the cloud by the end of the year."