What matters to Virgin Money is empowering employee innovation
Virgin Money is helping its people use the Microsoft platform effectively with a new BizApps Center of Excellence (COE) that provides guidance, standards and capabilities for the use of business applications across the bank. The COE has enabled accelerated delivery, lower costs and enhanced customer and colleague experiences.
Inspiring change
Since its inception, the Virgin brand has been synonymous with a spirit of constant innovation. Virgin Money, a tier-one bank with 6.6m retail and business customers across the UK, keeps this spirit alive in the financial services industry. In recent years, leaders have gone all-in on the Microsoft platform, making major investments to become a completely digital bank. This includes implementing a foundational Microsoft Azure cloud platform and launching a suite of modern business applications, including Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Dynamics 365.
As inspired and engaged employees started building their own applications, leaders quickly realized they needed to establish a central governing body for business applications, including development standards and procedures, to avoid the build-up of technical debt. They knew they wanted to create a Center of Excellence, but didn’t have the experience to create it in-house and needed a strong partnership.
The bank found its partners in Accenture and Avanade – a joint venture between Accenture and Microsoft – and together we began creating Virgin Money’s BizApps COE.
Driving innovation
We established the BizApps COE as an enabling function that promotes, facilitates and assists in the use and delivery of the bank’s Microsoft business applications platform. The COE offers Virgin Money’s colleagues and customers various services that aim to improve delivery efficiency, lower costs and enhance experiences through standardization, innovation and subject matter expertise. The team is structured to provide advisory services, build capabilities and enable self-services that colleagues can use to create solutions in a structured, standardized way — supporting the strategic vision and avoiding technical debt.
Pillars of the COE include:
- Platform management, ensuring the BizApps solutions operate effectively, overseeing costs, cloud controls and evergreen change.
- Project support to enable, accelerate and standardize the delivery of BizApps solutions.
- Capability maturity to introduce and improve platform and service capabilities, including a citizen development framework.
- Colleague and customer support for apps that have been onboarded and minor enhancement services for those without long-running squads. The COE also supports pro-dev and citizen-dev communities of practice.
Achieving what matters
Virgin Money’s BizApps COE lays the foundation to continue supporting both colleagues and customers. The bank has already adopted about 95% of what Power Platform can do and is at 50% capacity for Dynamics. Citizen development has taken off, and many of the successful solutions that have been built across the bank have been underpinned by the COE team, all contributing to increased customer and colleague engagement, streamlined operational processes, reduced costs and lowered development time to deliver.
By putting in place the proper strategy, technical design, user provisions and governance, the COE has continued to scale and provide consistency across the bank.
Deliver innovative banking experiences for customers and employees by intelligently balancing human and digital interactions.
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