What Is Jyske Bank?
Industry: Private Banking and Investment
Customer Site: Copenhagen, Denmark
Jyske Bank is part of Jyske Bank Group and solely serves international private clients. Jyske Bank focuses on giving its clients personal and individual investment advice and establishing long-term relationships with those clients. Jyske Bank has about 20,000 clients from 135 countries.
Success Story Highlights
- Support the strategic business needs of a modern IT organization
- Providing higher-level processing
- Removing slack time from the new multi-server processing system
- Increase data flow and parallelize processes
- Reduce man-hours through IT process automation
Challenge
Like most major financial institutions around the world, Jyske Bank, Denmark’s second largest independent bank and a strong presence in the Euro-Scandinavian marketplace, is committed to providing cutting-edge customer service. But as its private banking business continued to grow, the company last year found itself challenged to keep up with the data processing requirements of its customers’ investment portfolios.
“Each night, all portfolio transactions from that day’s activities — trades, changes, interest payments, and such — are sent from our mainframe to our portfolio management system,” noted Klaus Haulrich, systems developer for Jyske Bank A/S. “The numbers must be crunched by the time our portfolio managers return in the morning. We found that the number of transactions was growing too large for the four-hour batch window we had available each night.”
Facing yet another increase in portfolios, Haulrich knew the time had come to expand the number of servers hosting the management software. Up until that point, the bank had been using simple DOS scripts to manage the processing; with the increase in servers, however, this solution no longer would be able to keep up. A better answer was needed.
The Solution
“Our internet search led us to a couple leading job scheduling products,” he said. “The one we were drawn to was ActiveBatch.” ActiveBatch Workload Automation, from Morristown, New Jersey-based Advanced Systems Concepts, Inc., is a highly advanced enterprise job scheduling solution for Windows, UNIX, Linux, and OpenVMS platforms. Unlike most job schedulers, ActiveBatch is uniquely able to support the strategic business needs of a modern IT organization by providing higher-level processing capabilities.
Jyske Bank intended to use these capabilities, especially the application’s real-time, event-driven processing, to remove slack time from the new multi-server processing system.
“Our plan was to run jobs in parallel on different servers,” Haulrich stated. “Each major job is a sequence of smaller batch jobs. ActiveBatch would allow us to complete these jobs successfully by monitoring them and identifying their completion before triggering the next in the sequence.”
Once Jyske Bank installed ActiveBatch, Haulrich began implementing surveillance features that would monitor the complex batch flow of the portfolio management system.
The surveillance was mainly handled by ActiveBatch’s monitoring and alerting features. Haulrich’s goal was to make the system self-repairing.
“Most errors come from stale lock files and the like,” he noted. “In the event that the system can’t handle an error itself, it must report to our IT surveillance office that monitors all of our systems 24/7. They have the ability to call me during the night so that the batch process is done by the time our portfolio managers return in the morning."
Through the use of ActiveBatch, Jyske Bank has been able to handle four times the number of portfolios. Due mostly to the increased data flow and external sources, the bank is currently experiencing more errors — however, within a few months it expects the system to be largely self-maintained. When that goal is reached, Haulrich says, the full benefit of ActiveBatch will be realized.
“We expect to use half the number of financial man-hours to correct errors in the portfolios. Moreover, we’re going to use almost no man-hours to operate the system, and it will be much easier for us to make changes and expand the system,” he states.
“ActiveBatch is a feature-rich, easy-to-understand application,” Haulrich continued. “It’s extremely intuitive to operate and design the system, even for people who aren’t technical geeks. In spite of this, it’s possible for a tech guru to perform very complex operations. Along with this we benefit from the fact that our financial staff can overview the system and easily see what tasks are running.
“ActiveBatch has given us the means to parallelize a bunch of processes and control the workflow in an easy way,” he concluded. “This has enabled us to process more data during our nightly window and thus handle more customers.”