AKB delivers projects faster with reusable MuleSoft APIs.

Challenge

Connecting systems to Avaloq to create new digital services

Aargauische Kantonalbank is one of the leading universal banks for private individuals and companies in the Canton of Aargau, serving around 260,000 clients, including institutional investors. Founded in 1913, Aargauische Kantonalbank is wholly owned by the Canton of Aargau. The bank operates 32 branches across the Canton of Aargau and the neighbouring Solothurn region of Olten-Gösgen-Gäu, employing just over 1,000 staff members.

In 2016, AKB’s core banking system, Avaloq, formed the foundation of its business operations. At that time, new digital systems and services were integrated through individually developed interfaces tailored to specific use cases. As each interface was designed for a particular integration, reuse was limited, and the number of interfaces increased over time. For example, the integration of the customer banking portal with Avaloq was a multi-year effort. As a result, the IT team managed and operated a landscape of approximately 300 interfaces.

At the time, development followed a traditional waterfall methodology. Together with the existing architectural setup, this influenced the overall pace at which new services were introduced, with some initiatives taking several months or longer to reach production. To improve time-to-market and support cost-efficient development, the bank identified the need for an updated integration strategy.

Objectives

Establishing a standard integration layer

The strategic move from custom interfaces to a standard integration layer would help the bank to deliver on key objectives, such as:

• Getting new digital services to customers faster.
• Reducing development and operational costs.
• Increasing long-term agility and adaptability.

Solution

Accelerating development with reusability and standardization

AKB evaluated several solutions before selecting MuleSoft as its integration layer. The IT team implemented the Anypoint Platform with support from MuleSoft Professional Services. Today, around 70 systems are integrated with MuleSoft APIs.

Staff create APIs in Anypoint API Designer, and Anypoint Exchange makes them, along with connectors and templates, available to multiple departments as part of an initiative called ‘API-led connectivity’, which promotes reusability and standardization. The bank’s three-tiered architecture includes layers for system, process, and experience APIs. The system layer contains data that is needed constantly by multiple systems. The process layer combines data from different sources and surfaces it for specific actions, such as finding a loan status. This is then pulled into user-facing apps in the experience layer. Developers can reuse APIs at any level to speed up delivery times.

“MuleSoft’s API-led approach is what we needed to build a network of reusable components and a loosely coupled architecture,” said Konstantinos Tsolakidis, Head of Integration & Automation @AKB. “The hybrid deployment functionality of Anypoint Runtime Manager also allows us to deploy APIs in the cloud or on- premises depending on the use case, while providing a unified view of applications, servers, and APIs.”

The first solution integrated with Avaloq and other systems using MuleSoft APIs was the mortgage advisory tool, Fiberto, which pulls from a data warehouse to help advisors evaluate properties and offer the right mortgage to customers. The team also used MuleSoft to create a digital client advisory solution, which replaces paper forms.

Results

Becoming a leading digital bank

Today, there are 70 apps built on MuleSoft making 500,000 daily API calls. The bank has digitalized critical services such as customer feedback analytics and card order processing, and simplified direct debit transactions. Around 50% of APIs are reused. This cuts down development times and costs while empowering the bank to deliver more personalized services to customers faster.

AKB developers also shifted to an agile approach and now use Jira to track projects, which helps deliver them four times faster and stay on budget. They can now integrate new solutions in 10 to 25 days, and thanks to reusability, they run projects in parallel. As the application development team has grown and learned more skills, their capabilities have grown too. Initially, a team of 10 developers could work on four projects in parallel. Now, the same number of developers can run between 20 to 50 projects concurrently.