TriniChain Bank (S4)

Case study Based on session 4

© 2022 Georges Ataya

 TriniChain
Introduction to TriniChain Bank

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. TriniChain services
The banking operations are supported from the
corporate headquarters of TriniChain in Savings and checking
Loans Personal banking
Waterloo, Belgian Brabant. In many ways, accounts
Personal banking services and
Traditional banking services Personal and business loans
TriniChain has gained a considerable reputation for consumers
investment support
for its financial, insurance and banking services
across various EU and non EU countries.

Since the early days of internet banking, Credit cards Home finance Insurance
Capabilities to contract
TriniChain developed financial products to take Credit facilities and Personal home financing
insurance products in various
international credit card through mortgage offerings
advantage of new technologies. Alan, the countries by remotely signing
support Innovative products include:
insurance contracts.
Marketing Director was instrumental to
develop novel services that regularly caught the
competition by surprise.
2
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.
TriniChain
Bank
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.

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.
Board of Director
Amy Bhagat, Senior VP Card Service
Patricia 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 TriniChain
operations and services. They identify new
business opportunities and concepts for new Bank
services and financial products.

4
Management Team
TriniChain
Bank
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.

5
Supporting Committees TriniChain
Bank
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

6
The Digital Transformation Organization

The new CIO baptised the IT Department “The Digital Platform as a service capabilities and products are currently highly in
Transformation Department”. She adopted an agile systems demand following waves of training sessions intended to spread the
development method to ensure projects are carried out in close
partnership with demanding business units and product experts. knowledge on standardized platforms. When a “standard platform” is
adopted by the company, it is rapidly made available through a
The traditional IT departments are gradually being transformed into
standard purchasing process. It is then used as a de-facto
centres of excellence for supplying various IT and business services.
The operations department delivers access to processing and environment to host systems needed for supporting new business or
network facilities including cloud services. Those Cloud services are technical demands. Integration interfaces are made available to
exploited in many innovative methods: allow direct access to ERP and CRM data by several decentralized
Software as a service (SAAS) is abundantly used. Customer and locally developed applications.
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. TriniChain
Enterprise resources Planning systems (ERP) are based on an SAP Bank
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.

7
Systems development

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.
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.
Operations experts manage remaining applications that are not under the control
of development teams.

8
Resources

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.
TriniChain
Bank

9
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.

TriniChain
Bank

10
 TriniChain
Bank

Exercise 0

Identify business drivers (important

business objectives) and associate IT
related objectives that are necessary
for those business drivers.

11
 Exercise 0
Identify business drivers
(important business objectives)
and associate IT related
objectives that are necessary for
those business drivers.

Business Drivers

Effective services Keeping the reputation as a reliable and trustworthy

financial service provider in Europe, delivering effective and
compliant business services
New markets Allow clients to get up and running in new geographical
locations and countries
New services Prepare for new services to keep up with market needs

12
 TriniChain
Bank
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

13
Data Analytics

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. TriniChain
Bank

14

Platform as a service
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.
15
TriniChain Exercise 1
Bank
Following up on recent misfortune with systems and
technology, the Bank management decided to convene with
the new head of the Digital Transformation Department and
start a GEIT initiative.
You are the Senior consultant appointed to make this happen.
a) Analyse the general organisational environment in which
the change needs to be enabled.
b) Analyse stakeholders involved in the initiative.
c) Establish a wake-up call, communicated by the IT executive
strategy or steering committee (or an equivalent
governance structure) to create awareness of the
programme, its drivers and its objectives amongst all
stakeholders.

16
 Exercise 1
a) Identify key enterprise and
supporting IT-related goals.

Generic Enterprise Goals (Generic) Generic Alignment goals (IT)

AG03 Financial : Realized benefits from I&T enabled investments and

EG01 Financial services portfolio
Portfolio of competitive products AG13 Learning and Growth : Knowledge, expertise and initiatives for
business innovation
and services
AG05 Customer : Delivery of I&T services in line with business
EG05 Customer requirements
Customer-oriented service culture
AG06 Customer : Agility to turn business requirements into operational
EG12 Growth solutions
Managed digital transformation AG08 Internal : Enabling and supporting business processes by integrating
applications and Technology
programs

17

Exercise 2 A
List challenges that Trinichain has in
relation to its I&T Governance activities
and its alignment Goals.
and link those to specific Management
objectives (MO) from COBIT (in the
domains APO, BAI, DSS, and MEA). List
up to four Challenges /(MO)
TriniChain
Bank
Example:
Alignment Goal: AG08 Internal : Enabling and supporting
business processes by integrating applications and
Technology
Challenge : “..failed to obtain an accreditation .. “.
Accreditation project failure
Management objectives (MO)
MEA03—Managed Compliance With External Requirements
BAI11—Managed Projects
APO12—Managed Risk
18

Exercise 2 B
For each challenge, identify the
potential shortcoming in relation to
maturity components as related to the
Management Objective that have been
identified in the previous question.
List up to two most important
components for each Management
Objective.
Explain what could have been the failure
(Invent and comment on a realistic
situation, if there exist no details
provided by the case study).
TriniChain
Bank
Example:
Alignment Goal: AG08 Internal : Enabling and supporting business processes
by integrating applications and Technology
Challenge : “..failed to obtain an accreditation .. “. Accreditation project failure
Management objectives (MO)
MEA03—Managed Compliance With External Requirements
Component: Process: The team was not able to inventory the various
activities as required for an accreditation.
Component: Information: The project team did not collect relevant
information to guide in reaching the expected outcome
BAI11—Managed Projects
Component: organisation Structure: No project manager was appointed
to direct the various activities as required for the accreditation
APO12—Managed Risk
Component: Behaviour: Organisations do not have the reflex to identify
shortcomings and risks and to conduct actions to ensure challenges are
identified and then removed or reduced.
19
Conclusion

TriniChain Bank
This case study requires 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
Case study
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 © 2022 Georges Ataya

adequate solutions are debated and approved by

management on business ground as well.

20
Goals Cascade
Transformed stakeholder needs into an enterprise’s actionable strategy

Stakeholder Drivers and Needs

Enterprise Goals

Alignment Goals

Governance and Management

Objectives
Enterprise Goals and Metrics
Reference BSC Enterprise Goal
Dimension

EG01 Financial Portfolio of competitive products and services

EG02 Financial Managed business risk
EG03 Financial Compliance with external laws and regulations
EG04 Financial Quality of financial information
EG05 Customer Customer-oriented service culture
EG06 Customer Business service continuity and availability
EG07 Customer Quality of management information
EG08 Internal Optimization of internal business process functionality
EG09 Internal Optimization of business process costs
EG10 Internal Staff skills, motivation and productivity
EG11 Internal Compliance with internal policies
EG12 Growth Managed digital transformation programs
EG13 Growth Product and business innovation
Alignment Goals and Metrics
Reference Dimension Alignment Goal
IT BSC

AG01 Financial I&T compliance and support for business compliance with
external laws and regulations
AG02 Financial Managed I&T-related risk
AG03 Financial Realized benefits from I&T-enabled investments and services
portfolio
AG04 Financial Quality of technology-related financial information
AG05 Customer Delivery of I&T services in line with business requirements
AG06 Customer Agility to turn business requirements into operational
solutions
AG07 Internal Security of information, processing infrastructure and
applications, and privacy
AG08 Internal Enabling and supporting business processes by integrating
applications and technology
AG09 Internal Delivery of programs on time, on budget and meeting
requirements and quality standards
 TriniChain
Bank

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.
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.
Georges Ataya The Author participated in the initial authoring of the trinity
gataya@solvay.edu Case study.

linkedin.com/in/ataya/ © 2022 Georges Ataya

26