With disruptive changes taking place in the financial sector, mortgage provider Obvion Hypotheken was rethinking its IT strategy to gain a competitive advantage. The goal: use IT to enable, improve, and speed up business processes, rather than only supporting them. To achieve this, Obvion decided to transform its IT into a retained organization, teaming up with key partners to complement its internal competences. Partnering with Itility enabled Obvion to achieve:

• Increased reliability and uptime of its IT infrastructure and applications.
• Reduced manual IT operations, creating a ‘hands-off’ managed IT platform.
• Faster time-to-market for new features and improvements.
• Increased user and customer satisfaction.

About Obvion

Obvion believes that an appropriate mortgage is the foundation for sound financial management. So, good advice – and independent advice – is key, with a good advisor making the difference. Therefore its mortgages are offered through independent advisors. Obvion, a wholly owned subsidiary of Rabobank, is established in Heerlen and has more than 700 employees.

Challenge

Operating in a highly competitive market of mortgage suppliers, ease of service, customer satisfaction, and a short lead-time for contracting mortgages are key to being successful. Obvion's advisors are important stakeholders in this; they need access to complete and up-to-date client information at all times. Implementing this 360-degree view requires the modernization of a complex application landscape.

In order to shift focus to innovation instead of maintenance on the current IT infrastructure, Obvion started a program to become more future-proof. Automation and ‘hands-off’ IT principles were key elements in achieving this goal and transforming IT into a trusted business partner.

"On one hand, a stable and secure IT platform is crucial to provide business continuity. On the other hand, IT needs to start working closely together with business stakeholders to innovate faster."

Requirements

To achieve this goal, a radical change in the IT strategy was required. On one hand, a stable and secure IT platform was crucial to provide business continuity. On the other hand, IT needed to start working closely together with business stakeholders to innovate faster. With this in mind, Obvion searched for a partner who could meet, in particular, the following requirements:

• Act as full-service IT partner, supporting both operation and innovation.
• Enable a shift in the role of IT from service provider to business partner.
• Modernize and standardize the IT infrastructure and application landscape, while adhering to all applicable requirements for privacy, security, laws and regulations, and continuity.
• Implement automation and ‘hands-off' IT management principles.
• Expedite a flexible and agile implementation of new features and solutions.
• Deliver a ‘no-hassle’ user experience for customers, advisors, and employees.

Solution

After an extensive analysis and procurement process, Obvion chose Itility as IT partner. Key elements of this partnership are a digital platform, based on Itility IT Factory, and a way of working that supports their business goals and IT strategy.

• Itility integrally manages and orchestrates all services in scope, delivering Obvion’s IT in a retained organization model. Itility takes on responsibility for both IT operations and the continuous development of innovations.
• A software-defined, hybrid cloud environment provides a future-proof infrastructure foundation for Obvion’s digital processes. Itility IT Factory encompasses both a private stack and Azure resources in one integrated, highly automated environment that is operated with a ‘hands-off, eyes-off’ philosophy.
• A collaboration with Obvion’s application providers to modernize and standardize the application landscape, which provides internal and external users the tools to manage and communicate customer, mortgage, and back office data more efficiently.
• The implementation of CI/CD pipelines increases the speed and quality of the development, testing, and implementation of new features and improvements.
• The introduction of site reliability engineering (SRE) models, on-site presence of Itility customer teams, and recurring feedback loops with end users ensures the integral focus on delivering an optimal user experience.

Results

During the first year of this partnership, Obvion achieved:

	A powerful IT foundation, capable of incorporating new projects to improve and speed up Obvion’s primary process of delivering mortgages.
	Increased reliability of the IT landscape, with higher standardization and automation, leading to fewer incidents and lower downtime.
	Reduced number of manual IT operations, allowing effort to be directed toward innovation and development.
	Faster time-to-market for new features and improvements, thanks to high platform scalability and flexibility and the introduction of CI/CD pipelines.
	Increased advisor, customer, and employee satisfaction.