As a financial institution, you value customer loyalty. Each and every one of your customers presents an opportunity to expand your business, if only you could track everything in one easy-to-access location. Tracking data across departments is the key to modernizing and evolving your business, and Profound Logic is here to help. Profound Logics’ IBM i digital transformation services are modernizing green screen applications for financial busineses.

Consider the following scenario: A customer goes to the gas station to fill up their car. The gas station invites them to use a bank’s credit card as a method of purchase. Every time they use this credit card, they receive a discount on the fuel. As a consumer, they are thrilled. Any type of discount is useful in the COVID-19 era! The gas station is pleased, as they are likely to get more business. Your business benefits because more people are becoming active credit card users.

Now, suppose your bank’s mortgage department wanted to use analytics to profile credit card users who could also be potential mortgages. How can you tap into this data?

Steps in IBM i digital transformation

The first step is to investigate your system; the core mortgage applications that reside on your AS400 (now IBM i). This presents some challenges, however:

• Accessing information from mortgage applications requires the user to interact with green screens and scripting
• Marketing, and other line of business departments who use modern web interfaces such as Salesforce, have no knowledge or interest in learning AS/400 RPG programming
• The mortgage application was built in 2004 and based on direct system access, not in interaction with external web facing applications, etc.
• Developers of more modern web programs have little to knowledge of IBM i, and developers of the IBM i have little knowledge of interfaces such as Salesforce, etc.

Due to these challenges, your customer is forced to have multiple interactions with your financial institution which takes up much of your precious time. What if your bank could streamline the process? What if you could have one database with information, such as your customer’s usage rates history, and use that information to offer them attractive mortgage terms?Additionally, according to the World Economic Forum, new technologies will drive banking transformation over the next 5 years. Many of these new technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence, can help your bank make key decisions about mortgage offers. In order to properly integrate data from your IBM i digital transformation to these new technologies, you will require a software solution can allow Power Systems to act as a digital participant for this new reality.

To address these needs, you need solutions to:

• Create a modern, omni-channel experience for internal and external consumers alike. Today’s customers and workforce expect modern UIs regardless of the device they use to access your business apps.
• Integrate your business systems, and use web services to serve up data and re-purpose it in multiple applications.

This is all possible by using solutions such as Profound UI and Profound.js. Profound Logic’s IBM i digital transformation solutions can help your organization access information from modern, fresh interfaces for web and mobile devices. These interfaces can be created quickly and with very little programming. Thus, when your marketing department wishes to interface with IT, they can view data in formats that are acceptable to all internal stakeholders.

Additionally, Profound.js can surface the business logic layer of your AS/400 based financial applications and present this logic as REST API’s. These API’s can then feed into your AI, Data Analytics and Cloud platforms. In a recent win, Profound.js was able to help a major Asian bank scale up to 2,000 transactions from their IBM i to modern applications using this technology.

This means that your line of business and IT can now focus on how to better understand your customer’s trends and preferences, instead of trying to figure out data formatting. Profound Logic’s suite of solutions can assist your financial institution in leveraging the power of your IBM i applications to deliver the data you need to drive more value for your customers, employees and stakeholders.

The best part is that Profound tools and services are seamless and integrated, so you can roll out changes in an iterative, safe, and cost-effective manner.

In a future blog, we will look deeper at how your IBM i platform can be an important pillar in your AI and Data Strategy. Reach out to us at sales@profoundlogic.com and we can start exploring your business’s modern future, together.