Royal Bank of Scotland Case Study

 Vizone was employed by Royal Bank of Scotland to develop and implement the IT integration change plan after the takeover of NatWest and Coutts.   The Royal Bank of Scotland Group has grown from small beginnings nearly 300 years ago to become one of the largest financial services groups in the world.   Their brands operate around the globe to provide banking services for individuals, businesses and institutions. In more than 50 countries around the world RBS provide a range of retail and corporate banking, consumer finance, insurance and wealth management services.

This role involved the development and execution of IT integration change plan for RBS take over of NatWest and Coutts Banks. It included the replacement of the previous head of IT Change Management in order to successfully manage the delivery of the end to end IT Integration plan to facilitate the merger of the complete business processes and IT systems of NatWest Bank and the Royal Bank of Scotland.

For this programme Vizone supplied the Programme Manager who was responsible for the planning and delivery of business testing to certify that the full NatWest business operation functioned on RBS systems prior to migration.

• The programme was considered as the largest financial services IT Integration project ever accomplished with a budget of over £750 million.
• Responsible for programme management of a large team which had responsibility for planning the change delivery of every component of the IT processes and Business applications needed to achieve complete integration.
• The role was created by restructuring the Change Management and IT Services group so as to provide the needed focus on creating the separate phases and components critical to achieving success in such an enormous integration programme.
  This strategic restructuring was one of the critical success factors in achieving success.
• A forward planning task force was set up and pieced together the intricate business and technology change plan covering the period of integration from Sept 2001 to Jan 2003.  Vizone set up the processes which governed the review, risk assessment, scheduling and approval of every component of the overall change plan and chaired the Change Review Board which held overall governance over the integration change plan.
• The strategic plan developed for the integration project has a number of unique strategies and processes which are considered key contributors to the successful outcome.
• During this period of an exceptionally high rate of change implementation an independent review was conducted on the very low rate of change failures being experienced and it was verified as being better than the rate set for international Best Practice.
• A large component of the overall change plan under our control included the infrastructure build programmes which delivered the new Parallel Sysplex mainframes which now form the IT operational platforms for the Group.
• This IT complex is now responsible for processing over 50% of the United Kingdom’s daily inter bank financial settlements.

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