How does a Hogan core banking health check help fix operational issues?

Then run a Hogan core banking system health check, diagnose your operational pain points and boost your performance.

As Hogan’s creator and steward, Zoreza Global, a DXC Technology Company is uniquely positioned to modernize implementations, resolve complex bank-centric problems and augment your workforce. We operate tirelessly across business and technology environments to improve change management and time to market.

The Hogan core banking suite’s robust, scalable and easily configurable architecture enables clients to meet the ever-changing demands of customers, regulators and a highly competitive financial services marketplace.

Together with internal teams, Zoreza Global focuses on reducing operating costs and improving personalization while evaluating and capitalizing on fintech capabilities.

Implementation

The Zoreza Global modernization implementation strategy centers on several critical issues:

Providing premier talent to support clients as a managed service or based on time plus materials
Externalizing often used or shared functions from your core system and rebuilding them as microservices
Simplifying the integration ecosystem to allow the bank to leverage new solutions and services flexibly
Implementing new DevOps processes and tools to quicken your time to market
Suggesting new banking software solution and service models such as PaaS, SaaS and cloud-based applications to lower TCO

Downtime is a common enemy

The most common challenges faced by banks comprise managing risk, reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) and optimizing investment returns. Consequently, decision-makers are under constant pressure to upgrade operational performance. Meanwhile, users expect banking systems to run at full speed all day without interruption because downtime is the enemy; a critical issue to be avoided at all costs.

Why? Unchecked downtime can lead to draconian regulatory fines, extra business risk, loss of revenue and a rising TCO. Not only that, but customer alienation can damage the bank’s reputation significantly.

Business continuity in a majorly competitive marketplace like financial services increases corporate stability, productivity and profitability. However, soaring data and transactional throughput, shrinking margins and market volatility, together with a seemingly never-ending stream of regulatory rule revisions, are combining to push IT costs through the roof.

And that’s another significant consideration. If platform maintenance is costing north of 5% of the annual IT budget, you’re throwing good money after bad. But how do you improve operational performance without investing even more hard-earned cash to replace the whole lot and start from scratch? Answer? Run a Hogan core banking system health check — the go-to mediator for performance and maintenance.

Why run a Hogan core banking system health check?

To make sure you’re getting the most out of your core system. All systems are developed and changed according to the prevailing trading and acquisitional conditions. Data and transactional volumes are growing fast, which in turn, impact the system. So, to ensure your core banking system is running at maximum capacity and performance, we review the core components in the same way a doctor examines a patient’s vital functions by running a personal health check.

Here are just three of the tell-tale signs that you need to run a Hogan core banking system health check without delay:

Daily tasks are running slower at both normal and peak times. Critical queries are taking longer to process. Routine reporting that used to take 30 seconds now takes 3 minutes. CoB, EoM/Y and Black Friday issues (non-availability, latency, etc.). Timelines for regular activities are being stretched to virtual breaking point
Increasingly complex platform is outgrowing its planned scope
Platform maintenance costs are rising substantially

In short, your system is not performing as it did at go-live.

Another trigger point is when your system undergoes a major change (e.g., increasing transaction volumes). A Hogan health check provides essential insights, helping the team tune performance and resolve other vital issues.

Zoreza Global tailors the Hogan health check according to your unique environment and plans for growth or change. Following an in-depth assessment of the current state of your application and infrastructure, our health check team analyze your system architecture, providing clear guidance on accelerating performance while streamlining upgrades, overcoming bottlenecks and resolving other operational issues. We also recommend ways to achieve a smooth and secure program go-live and suggest additional enhancements for implementation once you’re up and running.

Together with a breakdown of our findings, we provide a comprehensive set of recommendations outlining the route to your desired future state. Where necessary, the project plan is accompanied by individual reports that double down on the infrastructure, Hogan product implementations, configuration optimization and performance levels, etc.

Maintain business continuity

Hogan has been safeguarding the banking sector for more than  4 decades. Over 40 banks and card processors use applications from the Hogan banking suite to execute the data processing for their core banking business. Today that means processing over $5 trillion in deposits, making it one of the world’s most prominent core banking systems. The flexibility and dynamic nature of the Hogan core banking applications allows you to select a cost-effective data-processing environment that best meets your needs for scalability, availability, data security and other prime qualities.

However, your elite Hogan banking platform integrates with many other systems. And that, together with the sheer volume of queries and transactions, can hinder and drain its performance. Running a health check helps you locate and examine adverse factors, observe interfaces and standardize integration strategies and tactics.

Your banking platform might have outgrown predefined scaling limits. Application architectures and infrastructures may need refining. Or the decline in critical query response times could require data optimization and database reconfiguration to help accelerate performance. Whatever the challenge, a Hogan health check finds gaps and suggests remedies.

The Zoreza Global approach

We provide a holistic rundown of any environmental and operational blockers. The Zoreza Global discovery team works alongside internal IT and business teams, interviewing stakeholders and running workshops and review sessions. We assess, verify and validate your architecture, integration framework, system integration, etc. to determine their completeness and readiness and to track down problems and identify improvement opportunities within your existing Hogan environment.

Kick off

Collect technical and functional documentation to avoid delays
Arrange meetings/workshops to revise outdated information
Establish team communication framework, meetings, calendar, etc.

Analyze

Conduct a detailed analysis of Hogan implementation
Identify gaps and local developments (L3 changes)
Quantify interface and other integration framework changes
Review infrastructure server workload

Document

Document all findings
Develop a recommendations report, listing possible solutions and next steps

Sign-off

Present findings and assessment results for stakeholder review and feedback
Discuss approval of health check deliverables and subsequent activity
Arrange employee onboarding and system access
Exit discovery phase

Following the health check, Zoreza Global ensures that the relevant experts are primed to apply recommended changes in- line with the bank’s strategic plans. And if the bank prefers to implement the recommendations itself, we’re always on hand to support the internal teams. Subsequently, Zoreza Global reviews the impact of our deployed recommendations, providing guidance for additional enhancements as appropriate.

Unless unavoidable, we retain the same core health check team for each project to maintain continuity. However, suitably skilled experts are always on hand to replace missing team members. A basic Zoreza Global discovery team comprises a project manager, two lead technical architects, one Hogan senior technical expert, an infrastructure expert and a solution architect.

Hogan aligns with growth

Independent domain experts acknowledge Hogan as one of the industry’s most robust and scalable core banking solutions. Proven stellar performance makes it the failsafe choice for banks looking to support growth without disrupting operations. Deploying a Hogan health check keeps your core banking system running at its peak and maximizes your business potential. Look at the kind of benefits achieved through partnering with the Zoreza Global team:

Comprehensive account access — Hogan core banking systems provide real-time access to all customer relationships. The platform provides customers with a convenient preview of all their accounts. Relationship packaging and pricing support cross-selling and retention strategies
Business and technical acumen — as Hogan’s creator and guardian, Zoreza Global is uniquely positioned to modernize implementations, resolve complex bank-centric problems and augment overstretched workforces
Exceptional experience — hundreds of years of collective domain-focused experience go into providing end-to-end Hogan-managed services. We help you meet regulatory requirements, manage enhancements and complete training programs
Modernization road map — our progressive Hogan modernization program provides a bespoke assessment and implementation road map to help transform your monolithic banking core

Interested in learning more?

If you’d like to discover what a Hogan core banking system health check could do for your organization’s performance and profitability, visit our website. To arrange a Hogan health check, contact us.