Client Synopsis
People's Choice Credit UnionOrganisation Overview
People’s Choice is one of Australia’s largest credit unions with 353,000 members across Australia and branches in South Australia, Northern Territory, Victoria, Western Australia and Australian Capital Territory. Created through the merger of Australian Central and Savings & Loans in December 2009, People’s Choice Credit Union offers a genuine alternative to the major banks.
Its origins date back to 1949 and it has grown significantly to become a trusted financial services provider and a leader in the credit union industry.
Fragile to Agile Engagement
People’s Choice Credit Union required assistance with the selection of a Core Banking solution to replace its existing system and several related banking solutions, such as Customer Relationship Management, Sales Origination, Product Management, Branch Banking, Account Management and Document Management.
The timeframes for selection of the solution were very aggressive, and Fragile to Agile were selected on their ability to “fast-track” the RFP process due to its previous experience.
Fragile to Agile were engaged to lead the RFP process which involved:
- Conducting workshops with key business stakeholders to determine the functional and non- functional requirements for the replacement solution;
- Creation of a “fast-track” RFP using a combination of requirements gathered from the business and Fragile to Agile intellectual property and the compilation of a set of generally required functionality for best-of-breed core banking solutions;
- Conducting workshops to determine scoring weights for RFP responses;
- Creation of scoring sheets and management of scoring process;
- Collation of scores from the evaluation team;
- Presentation of findings and recommendations to People’s Choice senior management team.
Due to Fragile to Agile’s assistance, the RFP process and selection of a preferred vendor was completed within the required timeframe.
To support the core banking replacement program, Fragile to Agile also developed a set of enterprise architecture design artefacts including a business capability model; current state architecture assessment; a subset of reference architectures and design principles; and a target state for the organisation’s technology architecture aligned with an agreed set of business outcomes to be enabled by the architecture.
Fragile to Agile also provided architecture services to formulate the Target State solution for the People’s Choice New Payments Platform (NPP) initiative (to enable real-time payments across the Banking & Finance industry), which involved:
- Stakeholder engagement for the elicitation of business intent;
- Vendor engagement to coordinate design across products in the digital channel, Core Banking System, Customer Relationship Management system and internal Technology stakeholders;
- Conceptual design to meet the minimum viable product for People’s Choice;
- Program Charter and Executive Proposal submission formulation.
Finally, critical to the success of the New Payments Platform project was the delivery and enablement of an Integration Platform. Fragile to Agile was engaged to help accelerate the evaluation, selection and adoption of this platform by leveraging existing Fragile to Agile IP. The Integration Project was executed in four stages:
- Stage 1 – Enterprise Preparation: Delivery of Strategic Architectures, i.e. the foundation of “the legislation” to govern the design of integration services, leveraging existing Fragile to Agile intellectual property;
- Stage 2 – Integration Platform Selection: Lightweight RFP selection and procurement of a suitable technology platform to meet the immediate integration need at People’s Choice, while being able to scale to meet future needs; including integration technology selection criteria refinement, elaboration, integration security reference architecture; integration platform evaluation support, integration reference architecture;
- Stage 3 – Service Design & Delivery: Establishment of process and artefacts to design and deliver integration services (whether this be internally built or outsourced to a partner), leveraging existing Fragile to Agile materials; including service design governance, integration project template artefacts and processes;
- Stage 4 – Pilot Service Implementation: Solution Architecture leadership and governance of service design and delivery of the initial service implementation, which will be used as a refereuce implementation for subsequent deliver.