A global financial institution, with assets exceeding $1.5 trillion – renowned for its comprehensive range of banking services spanning retail, commercial, corporate, and investment banking, along with wealth management, found itself carrying the weight of its own legacy. Monolithic applications were expensive to run and even more expensive to license, with 95% of applications still sitting on-premises, driving huge infrastructure and licensing costs. That footprint came with a steep price tag in infrastructure and licensing costs, made worse by a heavy reliance on onsite resources that made scaling the business a constant challenge. Compounding the problem, a lack of automation across both business and IT functions was slowing productivity and piling on operational overhead. To stay competitive, the bank knew it couldn’t keep patching an aging foundation – it needed a fundamentally more efficient, automated, and cost-effective way to run its IT infrastructure.
Ascendion leveraged its Pathfinder Due Diligence Assessment framework to dig into the bank’s infrastructure, uncovering inefficiencies and surfacing non-linear optimization opportunities that a conventional review would have missed.
The assessment shaped a clear Value Hypothesis focused on fit-shoring, reducing process and technology debt, cloud transformation, and hardware consolidation. Ascendion then developed a unified application architecture, complete with technology debt heatmaps to pinpoint exactly where optimization would have the greatest impact. They also developed a cloud transformation roadmap designed to eliminate vendor redundancies and optimize licensing costs across the board.
Delivered $38 million in total cost savings by year 3.
Enabled 30%+ of issues to be automated or eliminated through technology debt reduction.
Achieved 100% SQL license optimization through cloud transformation.
Identified a 35% fit-shore opportunity across five towers by year 1.
