Portal strategy
By providing an underlying platform for all its digital products, Aareal Bank offers its clients enhanced flexibility, efficiency and transparency.
By providing an underlying platform for all its digital products, Aareal Bank offers its clients enhanced flexibility, efficiency and transparency.
When Lars Ernst, Group Managing Director, Group Business Consulting & Services, talks about the future platform strategy with his Housing Industry team at Aareal Bank, his excitement is palpable. “With our envisaged Portal 2.0, we are creating a comfortable and technologically leading infrastructure for our clients, an infrastructure with numerous advantages: it provides them with a bank-independent overview of all balances and transactions, a simple payment release (adaptable according to individual authorisation concepts), and access from any device – wherever the users are, and whenever they wish. Our new portal doesn’t only grant our clients more flexibility, but also allows significantly less time-consuming transactions.”
Currently, a team of developers from different disciplines is working hard on finishing this project. ”It is our goal to create a base platform for every digital product, thus giving our clients an optimal overview and enabling a simplified administration of their tasks. We intend it to not only incorporate multi-bank capabilities, but also a single sign-on (i.e. signing on once, having access to all services), self-service functions for all basic banking processes, and the use of individually bookable, innovative add-on services – e.g. the Aareal Sign App – obviously with highest security standards and state-of-the-art signature media”, Ernst says. “Thus, the platform creates a considerably higher level of flexibility.”
Project manager Oliver Schimmel, Business Architect at Aareal First Financial Solutions AG, explains: ”We use the SCRUM procedure for the development of this portal solution. In other words, we proceed empirically, incrementally and iteratively, creating preliminary results and improving them as we go. This agile software development framework enables us to work much faster than with traditional methods. In addition, coordination is far easier because we discuss new project statuses and mockups on a near-daily basis. This approach also makes sense considering the functionality of the portal we are developing, as the preliminary results lead to its constant review and improvement."
