Speed to market for credit card operations

Company overview

Virgin Money was founded in 1995 as Virgin Direct and operated as a personal finance company. The ‘Virgin Money’ brand was introduced in 2000, expanding in 2012 with the purchase of Northern Rock from the Government.

Virgin Money has operated in the Credit Card market since 2002, originally under a partnership agreement with MBNA. Virgin Money Credit Card platform launched in November 2014. Migrated over 675,000 card customers from MBNA in March 2015.

Virgin Money’s ambition is to build a bank that makes everyone better off - customers, colleagues, communities, corporate partners and the company. With a powerful brand, strong balance sheet, customer focused culture and experienced Executive team, Virgin Money are creating the UK’s leading challenger bank, delivering our different approach to banking to almost three million customers.

Virgin Money are an extensive user of the Oracle product set using Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS), OBIEE and Essbase alongside ERPi, to manage financial data.

Situation

Virgin Money described the situation before the Credit Card Management Project was initiated:

“Virgin Money was facing the following challenges around the operations of our credit card portfolio:

reliance on multiple spreadsheets to manage business critical process
complex landscape, 3rd parties, VM systems and online
Expensive, tricky to maintain consolidate our reporting tools;

We engaged Seismi to improve our approach to master data governance, help improve the end-to-end visibility of data and help improve our ability to automate interfaces. We recognised that without a strategic approach to master data we would have difficulty delivering the flexible and scalable solution which would allow us to adapt to the ever-changing environment in which we operate.”

Control

Significantly reduce business risk by implement a robust governance solution over the critical operation of the credit card product portfolio

Process

Free up resources in the business operations team by allowing product and marketing teams to control their own master data

Market Differentiator

Reduce the time to deliver new products to market

Solution

Seismi delivered an Oracle DRM solution as a key pillar in Virgin Money’s “speed to market” project which allowed Virgin Money to change the way they operate their credit card business:

• Reduce Errors: Robust data model with data and business rule validation;

• Reduce Risk: User access control, versioning, auditing, automation;

• Drive Change: Generation of multiple output files from a single master data change process.

The time taken to release hundreds of new products was reduced from between a 4 and 6 weeks to 3 days representing an 85% reduction in length of time to market

Why Chose Seismi?

“This project has allowed us to centralise, control and automate our credit card master data, directly managed by our business users. This has improved efficiency, enhanced control and reduced the risk in a business-critical process creating a business advantage for our credit card division.

Seismi demonstrated their value very early on through their analysis of our current disparate process and their visualisation of how to convert this into an efficient and flexible process. They then partnered with us to help deliver what we believe to be a solution of the highest quality, on time and within the agreed budget.”

Business Operations Manager

“Our first pricing change last week took 3 days from brief to live deployment. A massive improvement on 4-6 weeks and creating hundreds of products!”

Development Manager