TriniChain Case Study

TriniChain Case Study .................................................................................................................. 1

1) Introduction to TriniChain ................................................................................................................... 1
2) TriniChain Fact Sheet........................................................................................................................... 2
3) Organizational Structure ..................................................................................................................... 2
Board of Director ................................................................................................................................. 2
Management Team ............................................................................................................................. 3
Supporting Committees ....................................................................................................................... 3
4) The Digital Transformation Organization ............................................................................................ 4
5) Market Situation ................................................................................................................................. 5
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6) Recent deployment failures ................................................................................................................ 5
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7) Conclusion: .......................................................................................................................................... 6

1) Introduction to TriniChain
TriniChain is an international retail bank with a strong presence in north-west and East of
Europe. It offers a full range of retail banking and related services to customers through a
network of local branches and reputed digital tools for e-Banking.
The banking operations are supported from the corporate headquarters of TriniChain in
Waterloo, Belgian Brabant. In many ways, TriniChain has gained a considerable reputation for its
financial, insurance and banking services across various EU and non EU countries.
Since the early days of internet banking, TriniChain developed financial products to take
advantage of new technologies. Alan, the Marketing Director was instrumental to develop novel
services that regularly caught the competition by surprise.
The traditional services that TriniChain offers include:
• Savings and checking accounts: Traditional banking services for consumers
• Loans: Personal and business loans
• Personal banking: Personal banking services and investment support
• Credit cards: Credit facilities and international credit card support
• Home finance: Personal home financing through mortgage offerings
Innovative products include:
• Capabilities to contract insurance products in various countries by taking advantage of a
competitive process. This was enabled by the capabilities of remotely signing insurance contracts.
All branches played the role of trusted third Party enabling any client to remotely accepting and
contracting insurance in various categories (Health, Car, Travel, Life, Cybersecurity, etc.).
Branches in various countries were encouraged to develop new products that were de-facto
available through the complete TriniChain network.
• Capabilities to obtain financial loans and payment guarantees by taking advantage of the overall
assets that clients possessed across the TriniChain network.
• Access to crowdfunding through a posting of opportunities across the TriniChain network.
For the last three years, the pace of new developments slowed down because of multiple failures
encountered when implementing new products or new features to existing products.

2) TriniChain Fact Sheet

• The bank has been around since 2010, and it is considered trustworthy and reliable by
consumers looking for pragmatic banking services. As a result, TriniChain has a strong market
share in home finance, savings, and credit card services as well supporting SME’s and
entrepreneurs’ financial needs.
• Personal and Entrepreneur related banking is one of the fastest growing markets in the retail
banking sector. TriniChain is also benefiting from this growth, and the personal touch offered by
TriniChain’s presence across major European countries.
• Global expansion has been one of the drivers for increased growth; and through recent
acquisitions, TriniChain has penetrated the London, Istanbul and Dubai markets.
• Seventy percent of total revenue is generated on the European Union market.

3) Organizational Structure
As a fast growing organization, the bank operates in a spread structure with various business
units and a series of shared services. The board of directors providing guidance to the CEO,
James Greer, and the management team of TriniChain, groups Business Unit managers. The
shared services directors reported each to the geographical Business Unit that is closest to their
location. Some of the shared services were acquired by local Business units and continue to
operate from their original offices.

Board of Director
Sunil Bhagat, Senior VP Card Service
Patrick McMahon CFO,
Kathleen Palmer, Senior VP Retail
Peter Jansen, CIO
Anna Sorenson, Assistant to the CEO
James Greer, CEO
The board of directors discusses strategic issues on a monthly basis and provides input on the
future direction of the bank. Management is regularly focused on financial return from operations
and services. They identify new business opportunities and concepts for new services and
financial products.
The chairman of the board is not involved with the company on a daily basis, nor are any of the
other members of the board.
Being part of the board is seen as a position of status grouping financial experts and marketing
experts capable to identify opportunities and to replicate identified cases of success.
The board is not technically literate, but opportunity conscious and interested in how the banking
and insurance industry is evolving.
The main focus of the Board is the future growth of the bank and financial return to
shareholders.

Management Team
The management team of TriniChain consists of CEO, CFO, and twelve vice presidents in
charge of the Business Units.
The management team has a strong influence on the board of directors and each member has
direct reporting in his/her products and services. Products and services remain under the control
of those Business Units that created and maintained them.
The main interest of the team is increased market share, accepting risk to a certain degree in
order to achieve it. Members of the Management team have different conceptions of business
and operational risks. Liberal views on risk acceptance are thought to be major reason behind the
bank success.
The CIO was appointed to the management team quite recently. She replaced the previous CIO
following a third failure in a product development. Technology is sometimes seen as a hindrance
to implementing global services.
By delivering financial services in various countries, the TriniChain management team requires
compliance to regulations in a fairly controlled environment. Regulation is not only relevant at a
national level, but with the expansion to Europe and into the Middle-East markets, there are now
various legislations to seriously monitor.

Supporting Committees
The management team has set up two supporting committees to accompany strategic decision
making:
Strategic committee: It analyses the market and defines strategic approaches for the company to
adopt. New products and services are analysed from their impact on the overall value creation
and the generation of Shareholder benefit through value capturing. As a result, many products
where launched at low profit margin creating perception of value within the client base. Few
champion products and services generate high benefits sufficient to fund the new products as
well as to deliver a high return to shareholders.
Shared services committee: It is concerned with current and new services made available across
the organisation. Shared services include the global legal team, the global IT team and the global
procurement and sourcing team. Those teams act on behalf and serve the various operations
scattered across business units and within various countries.
4) The Digital Transformation Organization
The new CIO baptised the IT Department “The Digital Transformation Department”. She
adopted an agile systems development method to ensure projects are carried out in close
partnership with demanding business units and product experts.
The traditional IT departments are gradually being transformed into centres of excellence for
supplying various IT and business services. The operations department delivers access to
processing and network facilities including cloud services. Those Cloud services are exploited in
many innovative methods:
Software as a service (SAAS) is abundantly used. Customer Relationship Management is based on
a Salesforce™ platform that is managed by the team located in Germany. The German experts
possessed development and customisation skills that serve the complete organisation. Members
of this team work proficiently with various European languages.
Enterprise resources Planning systems (ERP) are based on an SAP environment that
accompanied the organisation since its early days. After a troublesome initial period, the company
mastered the customisation process. Customisation effort was frequently duplicated to suit
various local organisations or to align to similar products with specific local needs.
Platform as a service capabilities and products are currently highly in demand following waves of
training sessions intended to spread the knowledge on standardized platforms. When a “standard
platform” is adopted by the company, it is rapidly made available through a standard purchasing
process. It is then used as a de-facto environment to host systems needed for supporting new
business or technical demands. Integration interfaces are made available to allow direct access to
ERP and CRM data by several decentralized and locally developed applications.
Local in-house development teams act as multidisciplinary agile experts. In the past,
combinations of multidisciplinary skills brought functional excellence and project delivery
capabilities to a higher level producing and deploying new services in record time. Most IT
developments have been taken on as in-house projects supervised by the central development
department.
Systems Development experts are highly respected because of their knowledge and use of new
technologies across multiple functional needs. To ensure adequate support to existing systems,
initial developers kept control over the developed applications through the implementation
process. They are also directly involved in software delivery, systems integration and
infrastructure capacity changes.
Operations experts manage remaining applications that are not under the control of development
teams.
Both Systems Development experts and Operations experts struggle sometimes with
uncontrolled growth with ever new applications and innovative but not yet mastered technology.
This typically results in applications redesign because of flaws in a used technology or a specific
component or application interface. As a result, the organisation faced recently many never-
ending development projects and applications had to undergo more than one redesign of a given
sub-system or to the complete system. On other occasions, data structure was inconsistent
between local and common applications resulting in complex development of expensive
interfaces.
Since IT is not centralized across local organisations, expert teams are not always available when
urgent decisions were required.
Budget and resource allocation is typically managed by the CIO in cooperation with a central
project management office. New development projects or projects redesign in new technologies
are typically taken over by newly hired teams, leaving existing development experts busy servicing
existing systems they initially developed.
However, to ensure adequate sharing of the common knowledge and to spread expert skills to
new projects, recognized experts are taken away from their initial teams to form the core of
newly created projects. This seeding process allowed to carry technical and functional knowledge
and expertise across Business Units and through product lines. This also enabled some bonding
between past and new colleagues.

5) Market Situation
After an initial implementation of effective business applications based on new technologies,
TriniChain gained a reputation of reliable and trustworthy financial service provider in Europe,
delivering effective and compliant business services.
TriniChain’s market share grew over the past years. New customers are primarily individuals who
are expatriated or are small and middle-sized enterprises that needed to get up and running in
new geographical locations and countries where they brought their expanded operations.
The Bank older products became less popular, Management rapidly prepared replacement
services. Such functional substitution was the trade mark of TriniChain and today, the bank
benefits greatly from substitution services that were created in the last five to seven years.

6) Recent deployment failures

Technical difficulties and project failures were recently encountered leading the Bank
Management to announce an expected decrease of the pace of the growth.
TriniChain experienced a series of difficulties including the following:
- The launch of a new product was interrupted when the development team failed again to
obtain an accreditation of its electronic signature. The solution that was initially
developed and ran successfully in the Middle-East would not be aligned with the EU
eIDAS regulation. The dilemma is based on the fact that thousands of certificates where
already created and should be cancelled and re-issued following the new Certification
Policy. That was unthinkable, the process would be too cumbersome and may cause the
loss of existing clients.
The development team struggled to use the existing solution on a different environment.
They launched major development activities but neglected some technical details that
were eventually imposed to rethink the overall technical design.

- Management decided to launch a Data Analytics activity. It consisted in data mining

information available in Business Units. The deployment of this solution was preceded by
a cumbersome information conversion and standardisation activity. Data was available in
multitude of formats and in non-homogenous data models, requiring to be converted
before getting exploited. The effort to collect and to homogenise the data took much
 more time and effort than originally expected, due to many specific coding formats and
to excessive local customisation. Management, in comparison, invested too little time is
investigating the real value of and expected promises from this Data Analytics activity.
They easily abandoned the whole idea without comparing contemplated benefits with
remaining effort, regardless of sank costs.

- One Platform as a service provider was bankrupt and some of its infrastructure was
purchased and made available by various competitors. As a result an in-house
development team initiated the development of a replacement of the failing solution.
As a consequence of the sudden unavailability of the platform, various business products
risked a continuity problem. To compensate for that possible outcome, the Bank initiated
the fast development of a replacement solutions. This resulted in a degraded service since
many features that were promised to customers could not be integrated in the expected
timeframe.

- Technical staff was unavailable to start a new development team for a requested product
idea. The development manager struggled to identify personnel that could be released by
their Business Units. On the other hand, maintenance and improvement of existing
systems consumed too much effort that could not be justified by Product managers. As a
result, building new system is seen as a potential risk on existing systems.
Management expects that TriniChain may not any more appeal to new young professionals,
young households, and a new generation of technology-savvy consumers. The feeling is that
new entrants in financial services are being more innovative since they have less legacy to
maintain and less technologies and technical environments to integrate.

7) Conclusion:
This case study allows the participants to conduct an evaluation of IT and business strategies
based on observed facts. It is based on an assessment and an identification of essential IT
governance processes and it exercises skills in identifying sustainable solutions that are defined
based on various essential governance enablers.
The justification and checking of individual projects against management expectations and
objectives and the presentation to management ensures adequate solutions are debated and
approved by management on business ground as well.

This business case is developed by Professor Georges Ataya and is the property of IT
Management Academy asbl. No partial or complete reproduction is allowed without written
approval. Using the business case is charged per named participant prior to the use in classes.
Any reference to existing or fictive cases is not intentional. Similarities exist in the naming and
in some initial elements with the Trinity case study by ISACA. This is intentional and is meant
to highlight the value brought by the Research foundation (isaca.org) to the governance of
Enterprise IT across the planet. The Author participated in the initial authoring of the trinity
Case study.