ATB Financial: An IT transformation for SAP in the cloud
About ATB Financial
With $55.1 billion in assets, ATB Financial is an Alberta-built financial institution that is a catalyst for economic growth in its province. The company got started in 1938 to help Albertans through tough economic times. Today, ATB’s more than 5,000 team members love to deliver exceptional experiences to nearly 800,000 clients through its many branches and agencies, 24-hour Client Care Centre, four entrepreneur centres, and digital banking options. Everything ATB does is focused on how it can serve Albertans—from providing expert advice and supporting entrepreneurs to helping Albertans buy a home and grow their wealth.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact usAfter transforming workforce collaboration with Google Workspace, ATB Financial set out to further enhance its IT environment, moving core banking systems to Google Cloud and upgrading to SAP S/4HANA. The foundation is now in place for ATB to digitally transform its operations and improve client experiences.
Google Cloud results
- Improves performance, availability, and scalability of core banking apps
- Calculates interest for hundreds of thousands of clients in minutes versus days
- Accelerates month-end close and daily financial reconciliation processes improved 2x through data consolidation
- Increases development velocity with continuous delivery and deployment
- Enhances ATB competitive edge through enhanced client experiences
Scales HANA instances within a day instead of weeks or months
ATB Financial (ATB) has long been a pioneer among financial institutions, focused on providing the best service to Albertans and working tirelessly to make banking better. It was one the first financial institutions to send a payment using blockchain technology and the first full-service financial institution in North America to successfully facilitate payments using chatbots.
Even with its loyal client base, ATB faces growing competition from larger banks and upstart FinTech companies. It launched a bold “Work Reimagined” initiative a couple years ago inside the company powered by Google Workspace to empower team members with the tools to collaborate from anywhere and improve client service. Energized by its success, ATB began looking for other ways to use cloud services to serve clients even better.
“Banking and financial services face massive disruption,” says Barry Hensch, SVP and Head of Technology Enablement at ATB Financial. “For us to stay competitive and keep innovating, we work with companies like Google, SAP, and other leaders, so we can be more agile and forward-focused.”
“Google Cloud and SAP have developed a strong partnership for running S/4HANA in the cloud. They are leading the industry, especially given the virtual machine capabilities versus bare-metal installs for HANA supported by many other cloud providers.”
—Barry Hensch, SVP and Head of Technology Enablement, ATB FinancialGetting the most from SAP HANA
To support core banking services such as creating new accounts, servicing loans, calculating interest, and processing deposits and withdrawals, ATB uses SAP applications.
As part of its modernization strategy, the bank wanted to migrate from SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) to SAP S/4HANA to take advantage of improved performance and more dynamic data models. ATB also planned to move from SAP Bank Analyzer to SAP Finance and Risk Data Platform (FRDP) to consolidate applications on a HANA-based data platform.
For maximum agility and cost efficiency, ATB is moving SAP applications from its on-premises data center to an SAP certified, all-VM based architecture on Google Cloud. “Google Cloud and SAP have developed a strong partnership for running S/4HANA in the cloud,” says Barry. “They are leading the industry, especially given the virtual machine capabilities versus bare-metal installs for HANA supported by many other cloud providers.”
ATB decided to pursue a cloud-first strategy built on Google Cloud, using SAP-certified Compute Engine VM configurations with scalable NFS file storage to provide a storage cluster between multiple zones and regions. It performed a lift, shift, and upgrade of its SAP environment to Google Cloud, bringing in Google Cloud Professional Services to build a blueprint for production environments for SAP Accounts Payable, Adaptive Server Enterprise, and HANA, and to help configure for high availability and failover. The teams used Cloud Deployment Manager to deploy a scalable SAP S/4HANA system that meets SAP support requirements and adheres to both SAP and Compute Engine best practices.
“To enable better client experiences with SAP S/4HANA, we need more data storage and compute power, which becomes increasingly difficult to manage on-premises,” says Barry. “Google Cloud removes those limitations while making it very easy and cost-effective to scale up or down.”
Now, roughly 60 percent of ATB’s technology environment is built around SAP applications, associated connections, and the data flowing through them. After more than a year in production on Google Cloud, the ATB team is confident that the majority of its corporate IT is reliable and stable, so they can focus even more time on finding new and better ways to serve clients.
Further, data consolidation has greatly enhanced cost savings through the simplification of a complex analytics environment.
Modernizing core banking systems
SAP application performance immediately improved following the migration. For instance, interest calculations for hundreds of thousands of clients can now be processed in minutes, compared to hours previously. Month-end close and daily reconciliation processes are likewise accelerated, helping ATB do more and move faster. Also critical, client-facing banking applications are available 24/7/365, with no downtime windows required.
“Moving our core SAP banking environment to Google Cloud gives us a huge lift in terms of how we can serve our clients,” says Barry. “We are now in a position where we can move faster to realize the benefits of being a cloud-native organization.”
Given the more advanced approach to technology management ATB took throughout its digital transformation, it has also started to bring team members in with new skills. This included DevOps professionals who helped improve performance through server, application, hypervisor, and storage scripts.
“Our move to Google Cloud has changed our mindset across the company as we build on our past success to create future opportunities,” says Barry. “From automation and innovation to skills development and beyond, we’re transforming in ways we couldn’t have imagined before moving to Google Cloud.
Supercharging DevOps and analytics
By migrating SAP and other core systems to the cloud, ATB no longer has to worry about purchasing and maintaining large hardware and database deployments. Instead, it can spend more time providing new and improved digital experiences to its clients. For example, Google Kubernetes Engine helps the bank enable rapid application development and iteration for its online and mobile banking systems, with fast deployment and easy scalability.
ATB has also moved its analytics data repository from SAP Business Warehouse to BigQuery, giving the bank a serverless, cloud-based data platform to power fraud-detection analysis and machine learning models for credit scoring. Dataflow provides a fully managed service for stream and batch processing, while Dataprep by Trifacta allows ATB to visually explore, clean, and prepare data for analysis and other services supported by machine learning.
In addition, scale and flexibility are further enabled by running SAP S/4HANA on Google Cloud virtual machines rather than bare metal. This enables ATB to reduce costs while increasing innovation across business units. ATB no longer needs to go through the timely and costly hardware provisioning it had while using on-premises IT, leveraging Google Cloud to scale up in less than a day rather than weeks or months.
“By moving to Google Cloud, we have the power and agility we need to create the services and experiences that keep our clients happy,” says Barry. “Google Cloud saves us time and allows us to respond to new market demands more quickly than before.”
“With SAP in Google Cloud, we were able to fully process Canadian Emergency Relief applications and have money in clients’ accounts in a matter of hours, whereas previously, this manual process might’ve taken two or three weeks.”
—Barry Hensch, MBA, SVP and Head of Technology Enablement, ATB FinancialEnhancing data security
As a sophisticated financial services organization, ATB employs many layers of security at the application and network layers. As the bank moves workloads to Google Cloud, the Google Cloud security model provides peace of mind that client data will be even better protected in the cloud, where it is encrypted at rest and in transit.
“Google Cloud delivers outstanding security when it comes to running SAP S/4HANA and other sensitive environments in the cloud,” says Barry. “Google Cloud investment in security is way beyond anything we could have done on-prem.”
After overcoming common hurdles many organizations face when migrating sensitive systems from on-premises to cloud environments, the ATB team feels well-prepared for today’s security challenges. The company takes advantage of Google Cloud advanced encryption capabilities, while enjoying better visibility across systems.
ATB also takes advantage of Google Cloud redundancy and availability to strengthen its disaster-recovery and data-protection posture. The Service Level Agreements inherently enhance these attributes compared to on-premises and save ATB from having to invest significant dollars into these enterprise needs.
“We think about questions of security and protection differently now and are finding ways to continually transform our best practices in a way that better protects our business and clients,” says Barry.
“Our move to Google Cloud offers tremendous opportunities. We can access computing power to bring artificial intelligence models to life and go deeper with data to customize every client service we offer. It’s giving us a competitive edge.”
—Barry Hensch, SVP and Head of Technology Enablement, ATB FinancialSolving old problems in new ways
ATB plans to be fully migrated to the cloud and out of the data center business. As the migration advances, ATB’s Google Technical Account Manager and Enterprise Support liaison will help the bank choose solutions to drive innovation and provide the most value.
The move to Google Cloud helped prepare ATB for the significant challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, putting it in a position to help its clients and Canadians at large through hard financial times. Most importantly, running SAP on Google Cloud enabled ATB to quickly distribute emergency funds when they became available.
“With SAP in Google Cloud, we were able to fully process Canadian Emergency Relief applications and have money in clients’ accounts in a matter of hours,” says Barry.
The financial institution is also getting more into machine learning and AI now that it is running more on Google Cloud, with efforts to begin leveraging AI Platform underway.
“Our move to Google Cloud offers tremendous opportunities,” says Barry. “We can access computing power to bring artificial intelligence models to life and go deeper with data to customize every client service we offer. It’s giving us a competitive edge.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About ATB Financial
With $55.1 billion in assets, ATB Financial is an Alberta-built financial institution that is a catalyst for economic growth in its province. The company got started in 1938 to help Albertans through tough economic times. Today, ATB’s more than 5,000 team members love to deliver exceptional experiences to nearly 800,000 clients through its many branches and agencies, 24-hour Client Care Centre, four entrepreneur centres, and digital banking options. Everything ATB does is focused on how it can serve Albertans—from providing expert advice and supporting entrepreneurs to helping Albertans buy a home and grow their wealth.