HERITAGE BANK LTD

– Wayne Marchant , CIO , Heritage Bank

trimmed back to its core purpose . “ We think that will happen in five years ’ time and it will be the last thing we do ,” Marchant adds . “ Creating open banking APIs to replace a cumbersome core banking system will not be easy , but the members should be unaware of anything other than the improvements they will start to see in their interactions with the bank . The last year has been taken up with preparing the foundations for a digital transformation . 2018 will see the development of core applications , customer applications and loan origination applications , which account for 80 % of the bank ’ s activities . “ It ’ s tricky , because when it comes to putting development into containers and using a microservices architecture , there aren ’ t really any core banking vendors developing in this way yet ,” Marchant says . “ Our preference would be to have a new , digitally designed core banking system . The way we develop these days is in small packages . For a specific task I might get the team to develop three different pieces of code , or microservices , which are stored in containers and very easy to access . The code is reusable : the smaller the chunks of code the more times you can reuse it in other applications . This approach makes our lives easier because it is easier to update – and it improves the speed with which we can deliver services to the members .”

This flexible approach will simplify one of the bank ’ s main goals for

246 February 2018