Personalised banking solutions across open and authenticated pages for 114 financial institutions in the Nordics. Merkle and SDC have developed solutions as a joint team since 2016, with approx. 40 people working together out of Merkle’s Copenhagen office.

Challenge

We all love a local experience but when it comes to online banking it is not easy being a small local bank. The battle for the customers is merciless and requires resources beyond what a small or medium bank can manage on their own. So how can small banks compete with the IT-muscle of large banks in a world where digital self-service is increasingly important as a competitive parameter and compliance demands are on the rise?

That very business problem is the raison d’etre for SDC (Scandinavian Data Central) who delivers IT infrastructure for 114 small and medium sized banks across the Nordic region to help them punch above their weight in terms of digital services and digital customer experience.

Services
Experience & Commerce

Industry
Financial Services

Market
Denmark, Sweden, Norway

Approach

The solution to the small banks 'unequal battle’ is SDC's NEoS - one platform across the banks' open pages, closed pages, web banking, banking app and children's app.

One comprehensive solution that supports integrated customer journeys across transaction and information universes in the Nordic region's most future-proof and flexible banking platform. NEoS is 'Banking-as-a-Service' - with the freedom for the individual banking brand to determine its own visual expression and display of functions and data - without costing stability and efficiency for the platform's performance. A kind of digital "Build-a-bank", with the freedom to create exactly the local bank they dream of.

The platform has 114 instances of the netbanking web & mobile apps running on the same platform in addition to other banking applications.

The architecture combines the user-friendly interface from Sitecore with a headless design making it a robust and highly flexible setup for marketeers and IT departments.

The result is a solution that is highly scalable in both design and frontend to match the individual needs of every single bank and their customers – both private and corporate.

”The NEoS project is one of the most significant transformation projects in Merkle NE. Imagine the scale and complexity of building self-service across 5 different countries with all the local flair and the complex business logic of the financial sector. And all this whilst still catering for 114 unique brands and the needs of different banking sizes ranging the smallest of only 3.000 to more substantial volumes of more than 250.000 customers. This is what we have accomplished together with SDC,” says Lars Harder, Executive Director and head of the in-house SDC-team at Merkle Denmark.

Results

For three years the NEoS program has served as locomotive to drive a digital transformation, introducing new capabilities, ways of working and a completely new customer focused organisational unit to develop new business areas which has been created around the new platform.

"The NEoS program has been a lever for a major transformation process at SDC, where the approach has consistently changed from having a technical inside-out perspective to a customer-oriented outside-in perspective. With NEoS, our customers have a platform that equips them for the future of a financial world. " - Sille Stener, Senior Vice President, SDC

As part of this transformation four integrated agile product teams and a Devops team today work together to deliver to the platform and continuously roll out new features and improvements.

Due to the new ways of working and the flexible, component-based architecture, SDC can now launch and onboard a new bank on the platform in as little as 2 weeks.

In June 2022 NEoS was awarded gold in the category of Digital Transformation and Silver in System and platform architecture at the Danish Digital Awards.

Keys to success

• Netbanking experience at scale
• Industry leading personalisation
• Customisable and modular