Bendigo and Adelaide Bank Modernizes Core Banking with MongoDB

MongoDB, Inc. today announced that Bendigo and Adelaide Bank has partnered with MongoDB to modernize its core banking technology with MongoDB Atlas as the keystone of an ambitious application modernization initiative. During the initiative, the bank:

• Reduced the development time required to migrate a core banking application off of a legacy relational database to MongoDB Atlas by up to 90%.
• Migrated onto MongoDB Atlas at one-tenth of the cost of a traditional legacy-to-cloud migration.
• Automated repetitive developer tasks with new AI tooling in order to accelerate developers’ pace of innovation. For example, AI-powered automations reduced time spent running application test cases from over 80 hours to just five minutes.

In less than three months, the bank modernized its Agent Delivery System, a legacy retail banking application, on MongoDB Atlas with the help of MongoDB Relational Migrator and generative AI-assisted modernization tools. The Agent Delivery System is a retail teller application for the bank’s agent branches, and is used in communities where digital banking functionality is made available from non-bank businesses, like newsagents or pharmacies. Prior to partnering with MongoDB, the bank ran the system on a legacy relational database that lacked the flexibility to easily evolve to reflect the complex data mapping requirements that today’s modern applications demand. Because of these database-related challenges, the bank’s analysts and developers were committing significant effort to complex database management tasks in order to keep the application running.

As a technological leader in the Australian financial services market, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank was eager to enable its developers to focus on more meaningful innovation so the bank could remain agile in a fast-moving market. To do so, the bank decided to modernize its Agent Delivery System to make it easier for its developers to work with data and create innovative, accessible banking services. Specifically, the bank sought to adopt a new microservices architecture to help integrate its data and a robust API ecosystem—a series of connective mechanisms that enable easy data exchange—to facilitate fast, easy data flow between the bank’s applications, third parties, and consumers.

The bank chose MongoDB Atlas as the underlying platform for its tech stack because of the high levels of security and reliability offered by MongoDB Atlas, its ability to manage the bank’s real-time, operational data on a unified platform, and because of the intuitive developer experience offered by MongoDB’s document model, which maps to how developers think and code, enabling them to build applications faster.

To migrate the Agent Delivery System to MongoDB Atlas, the bank deployed MongoDB Relational Migrator—a tool that helps customers eliminate barriers like time, cost, and risk frequently associated with cloud migrations—to expedite codebase analysis, service decomposition, and application refactoring, ensuring a secure and efficient migration. MongoDB Professional Services worked with Bendigo and Adelaide Bank to create customizable generative AI tooling, including scripts and prompts tailored for the bank’s unique tech stack, which accelerated the modernization process by automating integration testing and code generation for seamless deployment of the new Agent Delivery System’s microservices architecture. Legacy migrations can otherwise be long, expensive processes, but these solutions enabled Bendigo and Adelaide Bank to complete the migration with 90 percent less human effort and at one-tenth of the cost of a traditional legacy migration.

With this migration, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank has eliminated volumes of routine code writing and programming work with automated generative AI tooling, which has empowered the bank’s developers to innovate with increased agility and more quickly deploy highly-available and performant application features that enhance end-user experiences.

“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,” said Andrew Cresp, Chief Information Officer at Bendigo and Adelaide Bank. “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. We’ve started by modernizing 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.”

“It’s important that MongoDB empowers its customers to modernize 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,” said Simon Eid, Senior Vice President, APAC at MongoDB. “Applying the power of AI to Bendigo and Adelaide Bank’s migration process was game-changing. MongoDB looks forward to helping more customers quickly and easily ditch the rigid legacy technology that is slowing them down to achieve all the benefits a modern technology stack can bring to their businesses.”