Intel Report Core Replacement - Flipbook - Page 21
PART THREE:
The Conversion Plan
Callies and his team estimated that the full modernization would take between nine months
and one year to complete. This timeline included determining roles and tasks for each of the 60
employees on Seattle Bank’s payroll. Each employee had to continue to do his or her day job,
while also achieving specific benchmarks within the core modernization timeline.
The most important part of the process? Data mapping. This occurs before the replacement
takes place, and requires the organization to mark and identify each piece of data that the bank
owns and wants to keep in place, post-modernization. How important is this data? It’s essentially the entire bank, from debit cards, account information, loans and other data that the bank
wants to transition. If the data mapping goes awry or does not capture specific, large portions
of the business, then banks can suffer a significant financial setback, post conversion. “The
one that kept me up is the debit cards,” says Callies. “It’s a pretty big area of risk, in terms of
upsetting clients.”
If the debit card data goes missing, then on the day of the replacement, those users may pay for
gas only to realize their debit card no longer works. That could result in a customer that ends
the relationship at the bank. Leaning on the core provider, it took about three months to map
the data that Seattle needed.
PART FOUR:
Trial Runs
Protecting the data also involves working with vendors during the trial runs to ensure each
detail of the replacement gets enough focus. Finding issues during the conversion in credit
accounts, for example, prior to the real replacement allows for troubleshooting. If you know that
some of the credit data didn’t convert correctly, it may require more data mapping. Or it could
require building a technical solution to ensure conversion. “There’s always a little fallout,” says
Callies. “You have to be on top of the ball with each vendor [and] dig into the details during
mock conversions to make sure everything comes across correctly.”
Seattle ran two mock replacements. “The first mock conversion really opened our eyes that we
had not internally mapped over enough of the day-to-day processes,” says Callies. “We had not
yet taken enough of our existing procedures and updated them to reflect the same processes on
the new core.”
This gave the bankers marching orders to fix any issues prior to the second mock run, which
“was highly successful,” Callies adds.
CORE REPLACEMENT: HOW BANKS ARE REPLACING THEIR CORES | 19