Case Study : Banca Popolare Milano

As one of Italy’s largest retail banks, Banca Popolare di Milano (BPM for short) has encountered many of the IT challenges that face successful banks around the globe.

It has had to overcome the need to fully integrate its IT systems with those of an acquired banking group. It has seen through the analysis of millions of lines of COBOL code to create a single knowledge platform of the IT software assets. And it has had to react fast to roll-out new products and services to support its move into telephone and internet banking. 

It has met these challenges not through disparate individual projects to solve each one, but by taking an all-encompassing view of the software and data that comprise the IT lifeblood of the bank. 

Working with the Micro Focus Application Portfolio Management (APM) solution, BPM was able to establish with certainty the state, purpose and dependent relationships of 126 applications. With this Application Knowledge Platform built, BPM could then use Micro Focus APM to smoothly integrate the IT systems of BPM with those of Banca di Legnano, maintain and improve the quality of legacy applications, and build new Java applications for new innovations such as Internet-based banking.

Micro Focus Application Portfolio Management

Thanks to Micro Focus APM, the management at BPM will have all the information needed to handle enterprise application assets and align them to the company’s business goals. It will be possible to analyze the planning, timing and costing of a specific application development project thorough a single management console while also evaluating performance levels.

For the future, BPM plans to use every bit of information it extracts from the Micro Focus APM knowledge base to create a management console to support the bank’s corporate development. The data gathered will be used to ensure that it makes informed decisions about its application strategy, while also giving far greater control over the entire IT infrastructure and using this to drive down costs and improve management planning.