Vanquis Bank creates platform for digital innovation

Challenge

Establishing a centralized digital platform

Vanquis Banking Group has a rich history, dating back to 1880 when Provident Finance was founded to provide financial services to under-served communities. Over the years, it has continued to fulfill this mission, offering vehicle finance, loans, credit cards, and savings accounts. Due to its long history, the company had numerous disparate, legacy systems used by different departments, which were holding it back from advancing digitally. To stay ahead of the competition and meet customer demands, Vanquis Bank needs to be able to make rapid and accurate changes to its online systems, ensuring no downtime or errors. To enable greater agility and innovation, the bank decided to bring together its platforms into a centralized ecosystem that could serve the entire business. This ecosystem included customer relationship management (CRM), an integration layer, a loan and credit cards platform, a data analytics hub, and computer telephony integration (CTI) system.

Objectives

Connecting the ecosystem

Vanquis Bank's digital refresh aims to create an abstracted platform that supports all business departments, with a focus on two key objectives:

• Improve business agility by making it easier to update and modify core systems and processes.
• Modernize and decommission legacy systems to cut costs and streamline operations.

Solution

Creating a single customer view

Vanquis Bank selected MuleSoft as its integration solution, partnering with MuleSoft Professional Services to help deploy the solution and accelerate adoption. Working closely with MuleSoft, the Vanquis team quickly became self-sufficient in innovating with the MuleSoft platform, building a solution that handles 1.5 million critical transaction a month.

Vanquis Bank currently has around 60 APIs in production, all managed and monitored via MuleSoft. “MuleSoft makes it fast, intuitive, and fun to generate APIs,” comments Alec Massey, Engineering Platform Owner at Vanquis Bank. “We can build and re-use APIs faster, with a 40% re-use rate and 25% greater efficiency. It also makes it easier to apply consistent security rules across every integration, and if we change a security policy, we can update it across every API.”

Using these APIs in MuleSoft, Vanquis Bank can decouple legacy systems with the integration layer, making it easier to modernize and migrate its applications. The bank now has 13 MuleSoft developers working with up to five scrum teams. It has adopted a lightweight Center for Enablement (C4E), with the platform team mentoring and supporting the distributed delivery team. A new body called the Engineering Design Forum owns security and design standards and works with scrum teams to enforce them. This approach helps the bank scale up and add additional third-party resources on demand, while staying aligned with defined methods.

The first major initiative was to establish a single customer view. MuleSoft pulls data from 12-15 legacy systems, cleanses it through Vanquis Bank’s analytics platform, and then loads the normalized data into Salesforce. It also connects the data with the bank’s cloud lending software, telephony solution, and mobile app. For instance, MuleSoft ensures that credit card payments are updated across all systems in real time, ensuring consistency.

With all customer data in one place, Vanquis Bank’s sales teams can now identify opportunities, cross-sell services, and recommend the most appropriate financial solutions to customers. Looking ahead, the bank plans to integrate a money-saving app through MuleSoft, helping customers track their spending and identify savings opportunities.

Streamlining onboarding, service, and analytics

MuleSoft is also transforming Vanquis Bank’s onboarding journey. By automating calls to the bank’s decision engine, MuleSoft seamlessly verifies applicants, runs fraud and money-laundering checks, confirms addresses, and establishes customer accounts in Salesforce. MuleSoft will support around 1.5 million transactions every month within the onboarding process, providing Vanquis Bank with the ability to quickly and cost-effectively scale up if needed.

The next step is to replace the legacy service system using MuleSoft, Salesforce, and Genesys. This integration will automatically verify customer details, providing service agents with all the necessary information to respond accurately and efficiently to enquiries, complaints, and requests.

Finally, MuleSoft’s integration of business data in Snowflake will enable Vanquis Bank to conduct more advanced data analytics. As all systems and data are connected, the bank will be poised to leverage AI technologies like Agentforce and Einstein to power a next-best-action engine, enhancing the service experience for customers.

Results

Driving greater business agility and digital innovation

By using MuleSoft to integrate its systems, Vanquis Bank quickly established an abstracted digital ecosystem, enabling faster adaptation and significant cost savings from decommissioning legacy systems.

“MuleSoft has helped us build a flexible, connected architecture that allows us to rapidly evolve our platform to meet business and customer needs,” said Massey. “We can introduce new features, update systems, and launch digital products faster, maintaining our competitive edge.”