IBS - Nearshoring services for SAP banking solutions

IBS (Innovative Banking Solutions) is a manufacturer of SAP-based standard software for the banking sector. The challenges for IBS are characterized by a favourable market situation for software providers in the specialist banking segment on the one hand and a shortage of IT specialists on the other. This is because financial institutions, the customers of IBS, need to digitize their business and modernize their systems for a variety of reasons.

They are also confronted with increasing regulation from banking supervisors, pressure on margins in the low-interest phase and more intense competition from fintechs. For many, it has become necessary to replace their outdated legacy systems and host systems, which are difficult to maintain and expand.

Additional staff in demand

In order to simultaneously manage the high demand for software development services and the associated high demand for specialists, IBS decided back in 2007 to source resources from a nearshoring service provider.

When the company parted ways with its former nearshore provider in 2010 due to differences of opinion regarding partnership-based cooperation and appreciative personnel management, IT-Impulse came into play and brought positive change processes into the cooperation with its own corporate philosophy and employee management.

"With IT-Impulse, we looked for and found a competent service provider that operates transparent use of funds and billing as well as open and honest employee communication"

says Thomas Heinke, Delivery Manager at IBS, who heads the Financing development team and manages the collaboration with IT-Impulse.

Following the successful establishment of the lab for IBS, IT-Impulse opened up its nearshore services to other companies in 2012. At IBS, the focus is on SAP software for the areas of financing and reporting.

In principle, IT-Impulse's service portfolio includes software development as well as maintenance and support in other programming languages such as Java, C# or .net.

Other services include recruitment, support with employee management, the provision of a complete infrastructure at the nearshore location and back-office services such as payroll accounting, travel management, reporting and HR management.

According to Thomas Heinke, IBS was and is concerned with a long-term business relationship with the service provider and continuous cooperation with the specialists provided.

Due to its success, IBS opened another lab in Seville a few years ago in collaboration with IT-Impulse. The aim is to recruit more English and Spanish-speaking employees as well as to purchase additional SAP skills.

The services are identical at both IT-Impulse locations. According to IBS, the IT-Impulse colleagues are involved in the entire technical development process: from analysis to writing the functional requirements and the resulting creation of technical designs through to implementation in the Abap-OO programming language.

The subsequent technical test is also accompanied by IT Impulse colleagues in the labs. Here, closer cooperation is a matter of course, especially for technical analyses.

"Some selected IT Impulse colleagues with particularly good German and product knowledge even work directly with our customers on projects"

says Markus Rhein, Member of the Management Board and Head of Delivery at IBS.

"We are proud to have built up this expertise over the years together with IT-Impulse in our labs."

There were hardly any problems or hurdles when working with IT-Impulse.

Competitive due to lower costs

The integration of the IT Impulse Lab into the IBS projects has led to a significant reduction in costs. The lower costs make IBS more competitive, which benefits business development and, above all, customers.

In addition, the use of the labs forced IBS to deal intensively with the definition, communication and control of overarching quality and development standards, which ultimately benefited the quality of the company. The plan for the future is to consistently develop the labs further through professional and technical training and targeted recruiting.