Scotiabank to share proprietary software development accelerator with open-source community

SAN FRANCISCO and TORONTO, July 25, 2018 /CNW/ - Scotiabank today announced it will share bank-developed applications with the open-source software community, marking a significant milestone in the Bank's digital transformation.

The announcement was made by Justin Arbuckle, Senior Vice President and leader of The Platform Organization at Scotiabank, in a customer keynote at the Google Cloud Next '18 conference in San Francisco.

Scotiabank has shared the first component of its Accelerator Pipeline, a tool created by The Platform Organization (PLATO), a Scotiabank unit responsible for helping the Bank's application teams create new services more rapidly. The Accelerator Pipeline has cut the time required to prove that new services meet to the bank's stringent control objectives from one month to about an hour.

"The Accelerator crystalizes changes in working methods and approaches, such as Scrum and Agile, by allowing people to focus on the software and their customers, not checklists," Arbuckle said.

Sharing components of the Accelerator Pipeline with the open-source community means software engineers are invited to contribute improvements to the code, or to make use of it for their own projects, via GitHub, the world's largest open-source community.

"PLATO is structured like a little software company inside a bank," Arbuckle said. "We share the principles of software companies, including the belief that open-source allows for contributors to improve software, as well as attracting attention and interest in working here among software engineers who value open-sourcing."

Scotiabank's PLATO team is enabling the creation of transformational banking experiences without requiring developers to manage the complex underlying technology. It is part of a bank-wide effort to modernize platforms, accelerating the time-to-market for new services while enhancing security and reducing development and processing costs. PLATO also contributes to Scotiabank's digital culture shift toward becoming more agile and continuing to attract top tech talent.

Since 2016, Scotiabank has been pursuing ambitious goals for digital transformation, including an increase in the proportion of customers adopting digital channels.

"PLATO is just one example of the initiatives we are taking across the bank that bring new velocity to the development of better services for our customers," said Michael Zerbs, Chief Technology Officer at Scotiabank. "Sharing the development of our Accelerator Pipeline with the open-source community will generate even greater benefits for our customers and the community as we learn from each other in this space."

About Scotiabank

Scotiabank is Canada's international bank and a leading financial services provider in North America, Latin America, the Caribbean and Central America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. We are dedicated to helping our 24 million customers become better off through a broad range of advice, products and services, including personal and commercial banking, wealth management and private banking, corporate and investment banking, and capital markets. With a team of more than 89,000 employees and assets of over $926 billion (as at April 30, 2018), Scotiabank trades on the Toronto (TSX: BNS) and New York Exchanges (NYSE: BNS). For more information, please visit www.scotiabank.com and follow us on Twitter @ScotiabankViews

SOURCE Scotiabank