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Addiko Group consists of Addiko Bank AG, the fully licensed Austrian parent bank registered in Vienna, Austria, as well as six subsidiary banks, registered, licensed, and operating in five CSEE countries: Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro. Through its six subsidiary banks, Addiko Group serves almost one million customers, mainly in the Balkan countries, using a well-dispersed network of around 160 branches and modern digital banking channels.
Addiko Group is a specialist Consumer and SME banking group with a focus on growing its consumer and SME lending activities as well as payment services. Banking products and services have been standardized to improve efficiency, provide superior customer experience, and maintain asset quality via a prudent risk approach.
Addiko Croatia initiated the switch to a new service management solution. They were using a BMC Service Desk tool which was quite outdated and needed a more modern solution with additional features like the automized opening of tickets, customization, real-time monitoring, and connecting with other tools such as asset management and external vendors.
They started a tender process and out of 7 solutions, including service management tools like 4me, Atlassian Jira and ServiceNow, 4me was chosen.
Branka Jukić, Senior ITSM and IT Controlling Specialist at Addiko Bank says: “4me was the solution we liked best. 4me offers everything out of the box; incident management, service requests, asset management, anything you need is there for you to use.”
“Also, the 4me flexible licensing was very appealing and uncomplicated. With 4me it is all included, and we can also change the number of licenses on a monthly basis, which was an advantage.”
The Croatian head office is Zagreb-based but they also have around 40 branches all over Croatia. 900 users have access to 4me in Croatia.
The holding in Austria has 140 employees in Vienna and in Klagenfurt. The IT team there is responsible for providing the IT Infrastructure for the holding; the two Austrian offices and 140 employees. They are responsible for the infrastructure for the offices, infrastructure for the workplace, applications, operational support, and business solutions for specific business and banking applications.
Industry
- Banking
Location
- Austria & Croatia
Challenges
- Addiko Bank was looking for a modern enterprise service management solution that would help them become more efficient and agile across the organization.
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Solution
- ESM, SIAM, Mobile
“The implementation of 4me has been a great success; we now work together far more effectively with our users and providers and are able to add workflows and services at the speed of the demand, making us more agile.”
Branka Jukić
Senior ITSM and IT Controlling Specialist
The implementation was done with the high-quality service and support of 4me partner Imaves.
There were a number of security requirements they needed to sort out first. Branka explains: “Because we are a financial institution, we have to adhere to very strict rules with regard to security. Security of the 4me application was critical to fulfilling the auditing regulatory requirements. How is the data protected? Who can access the data? We spent until the summer clearing the security aspect. 4me was involved to assist Imaves and Addiko with all the security questions.”
In July 2021, the team in Croatia started to discuss the actual implementation of 4me for Procurement, Security and IT. Risk & Security was implemented first and was ready mid-August 2021; it took a month in total. Then IT was implemented, which took a little longer as it has a lot of services of which the structure had to be defined. IT went live in October 2021. Procurement took approximately two weeks to implement and was ready by December 2021.
Addiko Vienna went live with 4me in Sept 2021. Their implementation took 90 days. The implementation of 4me was done in parallel with the insourcing of outsourcing partner DXC (HP Enterprise Services), which is the main outsourcing partner of the bank’s subsidiaries. The second main outsourcing partner still uses Remedy for their customers, and for them, Addiko is the customer. They are about to set up an interface integration with 4me. Another third outsourcing partner (Comtrade) works with Office 365 and the team has already integrated the interface into 4me.
Daniela: “In Austria, we implemented faster than we had experienced with other tools in the past. It took us 3-4 months, including a holiday period. All in all, not more than 90 days from start to go live.”
The objective was to start with a certain level of service (80% of all services) and implement that fast. That was successful, and now it is easy to add things. The team is currently looking at the more complex projects like an access management process according to the requirements of the banking EBA guidelines.
Daniela: “Imaves is our first point of contact, and the collaboration is very good. They always respond fast and surprise us with solutions we hadn’t thought of ourselves.”
Addiko Bank used some of the learning and training available from the 4me site (using the demo environment) to become familiar with the system. After they finished the self-paced training, Imaves prepared an online training for the team. Daniela: “The training was clear and sufficient and helped us to do all the necessary settings
in 4me.”
Afterward, they just asked Imaves for support whenever there was a need. They also use the information with all the latest product updates in the 4me community, which they find a great source of information.
- Request Fulfillment
- Incident Management
- Problem Management
- Knowledge Management
- Service Configuration & Asset Management
- Service Level Management
- Workflow/Change Management
Release management and project management are not used much yet, but there are plans to do so in the future.
- Single Sign-On, Active Directory
- HR applications for onboarding
- Client provisioning
- Monitoring tool (SolarWinds)
- Lansweeper – planned
- Remedy (the tool of one of the external providers) – planned
- GLPI (the tool of one of the external providers) – planned
Initial feedback from the end users was very good; they like the application and find it very easy to use. In the 4me Self Service portal, they have all the different information they need, starting with how to raise a request. The portal already contains quite a few knowledge articles, the important ones were added first, and the team is now adding more to the database.
IT now gets all the information they need so that requests immediately land with the right people. They have one request, whereas before they had several, as they can include more in a request and are able to communicate with their suppliers in a ticket. It is also much easier to track the status of the inbox, how many requests they have and how many tickets are open.
Daniela: “It is amazing what we achieved in such a short time and with the limited resources we have. Getting used to a whole new tool in 90 days. It worked thanks to the support we had from Imaves and the 4me tool itself.”
“The cloud service set up is a real advantage as we are not responsible for the operation of the tool and the tool is accessible from mobile phones. This really helps us, especially with our limited resources.”
Branka: “I’m impressed with how easy it is to build a workflow in 4me. We can build it on the spot, which is not possible with other tools. Business analysts can now build workflows on the spot based on their needs. Also, you can apply extensions to requests and tasks, which is something we use a lot. Just like automation rules, they help us be far more efficient and customize our resources.”
Daniela: “We set up an account trust to share some of the services that the holding provides to the different countries and that IT in Croatia provides to the holding. The people from the subsidiaries using our services are our customers.”
Addiko is very pleased with the results. Branca says:
Based on customer and user feedback, the bank sees a significant increase in service quality. In the old environment, users actually avoided registering tickets because they could resolve them faster internally than via the external partner. Now, this has changed; more tickets are registered and resolved.
Branka: “4me is much more user-friendly, and it is much easier to introduce new services. Before, we didn’t have the time or knowledge to automate things, whereas now it is much easier, and we can simply do it when the demand is there. From that perspective, it is a huge improvement.”
“Now that we have been in production for 3-4 months, we have already implemented more automated workflows for new services than in the last ten years in our old service desk tools. Thanks to 4me, we are able to work far more agile.”
Austria already uses a lot of the reporting and dashboards in 4me. Control of IT processes is much better now thanks to the powerful reporting capabilities. It is easier to get real-time reports, and thanks to the complete service catalog with service level agreements, Addiko Bank can measure its service delivery performance.
Günter Walser – Managing Director, Group IT at Addiko Bank AG:
Daniela: “We are really impressed with the usability for clients and operators. People like using it; it is very intuitive and user-friendly. In the past, with some of the other tools, this wasn’t very good. Now it is really state-of-the-art.”
Branka adds: “4me allows the customer to do a lot themselves, where other tools don’t. Thanks to the knowledge articles, they can do a lot themselves; it is very user-oriented. And the tool really supports us in our job. For the specialists, it is great that we can customize anything and automate workflows very easily ourselves.”
Addiko Bank now uses 4me for IT, Security, Procurement, and HR. For HR, it is used for the IT-related parts – like onboarding – that are initiated by HR but then followed up by IT. In addition, Addiko also added data quality processes: data quality incidents. This service outside of IT was managed in an external tool before but is now managed in 4me. The next department to be implemented is GSS Group Shared Services, services that are provided (e.g., from Croatia) for every member.
Because the 4me tool is so easy to use and enables easy integration with other tools, Addiko bank is also looking to see if they can implement demand management, operational risk processes, or financial controlling. There would be many advantages to having everything on one platform.
Another great benefit is that in the future, countries can communicate seamlessly and securely with each other and share services and support. Addiko already has some integration between countries.
Branka: “The implementation of 4me has been a great success; we now work together far more effectively with our users and providers and are able to add workflows and services at the speed of the demand, making us more agile.”
“Our choice for 4me was easily made, having been inspired by what we had seen in Croatia. They started earlier and we really liked what they had selected. 4me fitted our needs perfectly so we decided to go for it as well. The possibility offered by 4me to share services through an account trust was a big plus.”
Daniela Stere
IT Business Analyst & IT Application Manager
at Addiko Bank in Vienna
