Nordea

The Client

Nordea is a major financial services group in the Nordic region, serving millions of customers across multiple countries. The bank's digital presence plays a critical role in its service delivery, customer experience, and regulatory compliance. Nordea's website serves as a primary touchpoint for customers seeking financial services, information, and support, making its performance, reliability, and accessibility essential to the organization's success.

The Situation

Nordea faced numerous challenges with its existing digital platform, affecting operational efficiency, user experience, and compliance capabilities. The organization needed a comprehensive transformation to improve website uptime, streamline regulatory processes, accelerate deployment times, reduce maintenance burdens, enable faster content updates, enhance accessibility, and lower the overall Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). These improvements were essential to maintain Nordea's competitive position in the financial services sector and ensure its digital services remained accessible to all users.

The Challenge

The digital transformation project faced numerous technical and operational obstacles, including:

• Coordination of multiple vendors for regulatory processes, which proved costly and inefficient
• Slow deployment times that limited responsiveness to market changes
• Downtime during planned maintenance that affected service availability
• Problematic synchronization across multiple availability zones
• Need to maintain high security and compliance standards throughout the transformation
• Requirement to enhance accessibility while improving overall performance

The Solution

Franky, an Acquia partner and Nordea's technology partner, implemented a comprehensive digital transformation using Acquia's suite of technologies:

Platform migration: The team moved Nordea from a colocation hosting facility to the Acquia Cloud Platform, providing a more robust and flexible foundation for the bank's digital services.

Regulatory streamlining: Frankly used Acquia's security portal to streamline regulatory processes, eliminating the need to coordinate with multiple vendors and simplifying compliance documentation.

Infrastructure optimization: The solution optimized infrastructure to drastically reduce planned downtime and improve effective uptime, ensuring consistent service availability.

Accessibility focus: The project placed significant emphasis on accessibility improvements, ensuring Nordea's digital services were available to all users regardless of abilities.

Content management enhancement: Frankly ensured a robust platform that efficiently handles urgent content updates, including time-sensitive information like stock exchange data.

Development efficiency: The implementation of Acquia Code Studio and Acquia Cloud IDE improved development workflows and accelerated deployment processes.

The Results

The Nordea digital transformation project increased uptime, streamlined compliance, and made deployment faster:

Improved availability: Uptime increased from 99.5% to 99.95%, with effective uptime improving from 98% to 100% due to the infrastructure's drastic reduction in planned downtime.

Streamlined compliance: The Acquia security portal allowed teams to handle Nordea's mandatory regulatory processes more efficiently — something that would have been extremely costly on the previous platform.

Accelerated deployment: The time required to move changes from development to live reduced from eight hours to one hour, enabling faster response to market changes and customer needs.

Enhanced productivity: The transformation improved the digital team’s efficiency, shifting 30% of maintenance hours to value-added development activities.

Faster content updates: The solution eliminated previous issues by synchronizing multiple availability zones, allowing quicker delivery of urgent content such as stock exchange information.

Improved support: Acquia's 24/7 emergency contact point improved Service Level Agreements (SLAs), reduced costs, and allowed teams to focus on value-added activities.

Cost reduction: The project reduced the TCO by 15% on a three-year contract, including inflation adjustments.

Industry recognition: Nordea's focus on digital communication — especially accessibility — increased its Bowen Craggs ranking to 9th out of 120 since the launch of the new website. The project specifically improved Nordea's 'Construction' score (for which they gained 48/50), which includes digital sustainability and accessibility.