Investec Bank (Switzerland) AG

Introduction

Investec Bank (Switzerland) AG, headquartered in Zurich, was founded in 1970 under the name of Guinness Mahon (Zurich) AG. It is a subsidiary of Investec Bank plc., UK, and thus part of a global financial services group. Investec is a British-South African bank quoted on both the London Stock Exchange and the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and has a market capitalization of approximately CHF 8 billion. As of March 31, 2017, it had total assets under management of CHF 158 million with 8,200 employees as well as asset management funds amounting to CHF 2 billion.

The Swiss subsidiary is mainly active in private banking and related services. Its focus is on the international banking in Switzerland, Europe and South Africa. Thanks to its independence  it was given an autonomous core database system tailored to its needs. Due to bank-limited resources with respect to Unix/Solaris systems, the database system was already handed over to CND in 2008 for monitoring, maintenance and support.

Infrastructure monitoring

As a first step, CND designed a monitoring concept for the entire IT infrastructure of Investec Bank. Together with the bank's system specialists, an alerting system was designed, developed and implemented by CND, that communicates directly with CND's incident management tools. This promptly and directly allows urgent disturbances to be forwarded to the appropriate engineers.

Operational support

Rapid changes in the business requirements for core applications and system landscapes require a flexible operating concept. Based on the close cooperation, including with the software supplier, CND was able to create a complete operating documentation. Among other things, this serves to implement adjustments to both the software and hardware, to make changes as well as critically using patch and release management that is both reproducible and tested.

License management and logistics

An up-to-date contract process, tested and up-to-date software replacement material (some with spare components that have been preconfigured specifically for the customer’s infrastructure) are key elements that ensure 100% availability of all applications and not only those that are time critical. Thanks to the logistics provided by CND, system failures and malfunctions, using the 24|7 hotline, can be instantly noted, properly processed and then resolved in accordance with the SLA.

Statement

"The experts at CND work very closely with us. They propose solutions based on the best practice and experience by implementing the chosen solution with expertise. , always applying a very customer-oriented approach in a system upgrade, in the customization and evolution of the monitoring solution, or in the management of our hardware and support contracts."

 Fredrik Bohman, Head of IT, Investec Bank, Switzerland