Data migration reconciliation a crucial step in bank’s digital transformation

Overview

• Customer: This leading bank on the island nation of Mauritius has a growing international presence with ambitious plans for strategic expansion, embarking on an upgrade of their core IT systems.
• Challenge: Numerous obstacles related to timeline, reconciliation, version control, high number of defects, delays, and large data files were encountered during the data migration process.
• Solution: Collaborating with the bank’s IT team and data migration partner, the Quinnox team developed a plan to perform data and financial reconciliation to ensure system upgrade success.
• Results: Reconciliation of all applications was done ahead of the data migration and cutover timelines for two locations; in some cases, migration delays were salvaged and the deadline met.

Business need

Major data migration project hinges on independent reconciliation validation

Based in the affluent Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, a leading financial services group was embarking on a major IT core system upgrade, dubbed project “Flamingo.” The project goals focused on leveraging new technologies to greatly improve customer service, operations, competitiveness, and risk mitigation. Ultimately, the aim was to elevate core banking functions to make great strides in four key areas – business, operations, service and technology.

This important and complex undertaking included crucial data migration from 16 legacy applications to the new systems. But, to ensure success, the bank needed to perform independent data migration testing or reconciliation validation. Done correctly, this would validate the correctness of migration by a third-party vendor, and meet target application requirements. Staying within the project budget was also a priority.

Reconciliation validation would need to include:

• Extraction of data from legacy systems
• Grouping of data into multiple entities, application-wise
• Transformation of data per business logic
• Comparison to target data
• Triage of data differences across mock migration cycles

Solution

Quinnox team takes on challenges with expertise, rapid response, and proprietary tools

Our team was already part of a multi-phase Flamingo effort, so it was a natural choice for the bank to choose Quinnox to perform vital reconciliation validation. Because of the complexity of the data migration, as well as obstacles presented by a third-party vendor, the team had to overcome a number of significant and immediate challenges.

Reconciliation upstream applications came with an aggressive completion timeline to ensure go-live – within 18 hours of receiving the target data. This included all activities – data import, data transformation and comparison, defect analysis, and defect triage with the bank and system integrator. The complexity and volume of data was also a difficulty – some tables were as large as 30GB with over 50 million records. Missteps in version control, a high number of defects, unanticipated delays, and missing tables from data dumps received from target systems added to the challenges.

Fortunately, the Quinnox team was well-equipped to overcome all these obstacles. Even those that were unanticipated were addressed “on the fly,” ensuring Flamingo would fly on track. For example, a rapid response team was routed to a third-party vendor to quickly remediate issues and correct errors.

In addition, a variety of proprietary Quinnox tools and accelerators were used that helped overcome obstacles and add value, including:

• Automated Source data and Extraction Tool – executed SQL script by priority and metadata, helping to rapidly extract data and execute precision uploads to targets
• Quinnox Automated Comparison Tool® – compared the data element values between the transformed source (expected result) and target, with differences written to a results table
• Defect Upload Utility – Used to read the incidents from the migration results table and create an Excel® file in the QC upload-able format
• Automated Product to GL Reconciliation Tool – extracted and transformed dynamic financial data from source applications, identified defects through mismatches, and generated GL adjustment entries to be made in the target

Benefits

Reconciliation validation delivered on time, providing high confidence to go forward

Data complexity, very large files, third-party missteps and delays, and other unexpected variables were swiftly dealt with by an expert team using powerful Quinnox tools, resulting in:

• Reconciliation of all applications done ahead of deadlines for both Mauritius and Madagascar locations; in some cases, this was completed in spite of third-party vendor migration delays
• Design enhancements of product-to-GL reconciliation that exceeded requirements, with key source and target differences rectified in the migration – a crucial step for a successful migration
• Verified GL adjustment entries made in Oracle EBS Financials General Ledger (R12) for Assets, Liabilities & Trade, and in Finacle CBS for Treasury
• Exceptional performance tuning for OFSAA reconciliation

Best of all, the timely and efficient reconciliation validation services performed by the Quinnox team gave the bank’s IT team-high confidence in their critical data migration. It was a necessary and vital step in moving Flamingo forward, and manifesting this growing bank’s core IT system transformation goals.

Benefits by the numbers:

• Source data from 16 applications validated
• 9 migration cycles within the scope
• 12 testing phase deadlines met for 2 location cutovers
• Validation of large data files – 30GB tables with over 50 million records