Addiko Bank switches to Xurrent for enhanced efficiency and agility

[With Xurrent], we are now far more efficient and able to solve requests much faster. We spend less time on a ticket, and we can solve more. Also, it is much easier to implement new automated workflows and services quickly, whatever we require, making us very agile, and the reporting is absolutely great. It is all an enormous improvement compared to the previous tool.

Branka Jukić, former Senior ITSM and IT Controlling Specialist at Addiko Bank

Austria, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro.

Addiko Group AG is a specialist banking group that provides banking products and services to Consumer and SMEs in Central and South-Eastern Europe (CSEE) in these 7 Balkan countries.

It was searching for a modern ESM solution to drive efficiency and agility across its entire organization, which consists of six subsidiary banks and serves nearly one million customers through a well-dispersed network of ~160 branches.

The process for finding a new partner started in Addiko Croatia, which at the time was using BMC Service Desk — an outdated tool lacking in the features Addiko needed to succeed, such as automated ticket creation, customization, real-time monitoring, and connecting with other tools like asset management and external vendors.

The search was on.

How Xurrent beat out 6 other vendors

Addiko considered seven solutions in total, including service management tools like Atlassian Jira, ServiceNow, and, of course, Xurrent.

Addiko Croatia

Branka Jukić, former Senior ITSM and IT Controlling Specialist at Addiko Bank, had this to say: “Xurrent was the solution we liked best. Xurrent offers everything out of the box; incident management, service requests, asset management, anything you need is there for you to use.”

In July 2021, the Croatian team — with help from Xurrent partner Imaves — began preparations to implement the platform for Procurement, Risk & Security, and IT. One month later, Risk & Security was ready to go. IT went live a few months later, with Procurement up and running in a short two weeks.

The speed at which this implementation was done was quite remarkable, especially considering the number of security requirements necessary. As a financial institution, they have to adhere to very strict security rules. “Security of the Xurrent application was critical to fulfilling the auditing regulatory requirements,” shared Branka. “How is the data protected? Who can access the data?”

By the end of 2021, all Addiko Croatia teams — 900 users — were leveraging Xurrent.

Branka: “The implementation of Xurrent was a great success. We now work together far more effectively with our users and providers and can add workflows and services at the speed of the demand, making us more agile.”

Next up, Addiko Bank in Vienna — the headquarters office.

Addiko Vienna

IT Business Analyst & IT Application Manager in Vienna, Daniela Stere, was ready to make the switch. As she shared, 

“Our choice for Xurrent was easily made, having been inspired by what we had seen in Croatia. They started earlier, and we really liked what they had selected. Xurrent fit our needs perfectly, so we decided to go for it as well. The possibility offered by Xurrent to share services through an account trust was a big plus.”

Between Vienna and Klagenfurt, the Austrian branches have 140 employees responsible for providing the IT Infrastructure for the offices, workplace, applications, operational support, and business solutions for specific business and banking applications.

Similar to Croatia, Addiko Vienna enjoyed rapid implementation — 90 days — thanks to work with both insourcing (the aforementioned Imaves) and outsourcing partners … DXC Technology, Remedy Consulting, and Comtrade.

Daniela: “In Austria, we implemented faster than we had experienced with other tools in the past (3-4 months, including a holiday period). With Xurrent, it was less than 90 days from start to go live.” 

Addiko Bank used some of the learning and training available from the Xurrent 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 was impressed: “The training was clear and sufficient and helped us to do all the necessary settings in Xurrent.” 

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 Xurrent community, which they find a great source of information.

Xurrent: Easy. Advanced. Complete

Our mission at Xurrent is to make the world more productive each and every day. We pride ourselves on being the Service Management platform that’s easy, advanced, and complete.

Easy: Fast time-to-value, rapid customization, collaboration in minutes

We showcased “easy” above with our rapid implementation times. 

Initial feedback from end users has further substantiated how easy Xurrent is to use. As the team shared, initial feedback from the end users was very good; they like the application and find it very easy to use. 

The same holds true with the Xurrent Self-Service portal — everything is there, everyone knows how to initiate a request, and the portal “already contains quite a few knowledge articles,” … with the team constantly adding more to the database. 

IT requests have moved from “many, disparate requests” to a single source of truth. Even better, the team has found it “much easier to track the inbox status, 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 Xurrent tool itself.”

The specialists really appreciate the ability to “customize anything” and “automate workflows very easily ourselves.”

Xurrent unique, built-in trust system makes it effortless to connect multiple organizations within or across companies. Collaborative activities can start within 5 minutes.

Daniela took advantage of this feature to 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 possibility offered by Xurrent to share services through an account trust was a big plus.”

Advanced: Reduced overhead, accelerated value, “state-of-the-art”

Xurrent helps to reduce overhead, thanks to our multi-tenant SaaS architecture, something Addiko has taken advantage of.

Daniela called out how being a SaaS, cloud-based platform means her team is “not responsible for the operation of the tool, and it is accessible from mobile phones.” 

Xurrent’s automation capabilities enable real-time cross-collaboration that enables any organization to achieve its use cases and derive nearly immediate value.

Addiko shared that over a short 3-4 months, they have implemented more automated workflows for new services than in the last ten years in our old service desk tools. Thanks to Xurrent, they can be more agile.

And Daniela is equally impressed with the usability for both clients and operators. “People like using it,” she shared. “it is very intuitive and user-friendly. That was not the case with past solutions we’ve used. Xurrent is really state-of-the-art.” 

Complete: Enterprise-ready, cross-collaboration built-in

Xurrent is enterprise-ready, supporting 100% of ITIL competencies while also having SOC-2 and ISO certifications. This was especially important to Addiko Bank, which was seeking a modern enterprise service management solution — one that would work for all of its banks across the entire banking network.

The team in Austria, for example, says that control of IT processes is much better now thanks to Xurrent’s “powerful reporting capabilities.” They shared how much easier it is to get real-time reports, and thanks to the complete service catalog with service level agreements, they can now measure service delivery performance.

Addiko Bank has also taken advantage of our cross-collaboration functionality — all major teams within the organization using the same platform in perfect synchronicity.

It uses Xurrent for IT, Security, Procurement, and HR. 

HR leverages the IT-related parts such as onboarding — initiated by HR, and followed up by IT. Addiko also uses data quality incidents, a service previously managed by an external tool. 

Next up:

• GSS Group Shared Services, services that are provided (e.g., from Croatia) for every member. 
• Demand management, operational risk processes, and financial controlling

“We are looking forward to having everything on one platform,” said Daniela.

The results speak for themselves

The customer and user feedback has been impressive: The bank has seen a significant increase in service quality. In the old environment, users avoided registering tickets because they could resolve them faster internally than via the external partner. 

With Xurrent, more tickets are registered and resolved. 

Branka loves how easy it is to build a workflow — on the spot based on specific needs. “We can also apply extensions to requests and tasks,” she shared, “something we use a lot. Like automation rules, they help us be far more efficient and customize our resources.”

Addiko Bank is operating more efficiently, solving requests faster, automating more, etc.

Branca summarizes it best here: 

“We are now far more efficient and able to solve requests much faster. We spend less time on a ticket, and we can solve more. Also, it is much easier to quickly implement new automated workflows and services, whatever we require, making us very agile, and the reporting is absolutely great. It is all an enormous improvement compared to the previous tool.”

Xurrent: Easy. Advanced. Complete.