Lean-Agile Transformation with SAFe®
Nordea Bank is a financial services company with a history dating back to 1820. Nordea provides retail banking, investment banking, asset management, and corporate banking. In the late 1990s, Nordea was a digital leader with its first Netbank and WAP mobile solution in 1999. As Nordea and its digital experience grew, it became more fragmented. Nordea was serving customers in more than 10 netbanks and began to lag behind the market.
As the world continued to change rapidly, Nordea decided it needed to change and adapt with it. In 2014, they created the Digital Banking Organisation as a “bank within a bank” to champion the new digital experience. From there, Nordea embarked on a journey to become more responsive. They adopted Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) methods to replace the traditional project management model.
Quick Facts:
- Leading Nordic National Bank with 200 years of history
- Operates in Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Sweden with international corporate branches in New York, London, and Shanghai
- 10,000,000 customers
- 29,000 employees
- Ranked as best digital performer among retail banks in Europe
- Over 120 million logins per month
Key Outcomes:
- In 2014, with SAFe, Nordea’s IT and business organizations worked under one roof in what is now called the ‘One Digital’ organization. All aspects of engineering, QA, Design and Customer Experience, Agile execution, and product management collaborated to achieve a better customer experience.
- More than 5,500 employees are trained in SAFe to date. In 2022 alone, 773 Nordea employees joined a Scaled Agile, Inc. training program (three percent of the workforce).
- More than 100 Agile Teams and Agile Release Trains operate across the bank, ranging from Marketing to Business and IT teams, often collaborating cross-functionally towards a common goal.
- Nordea successfully consolidated 46 fragmented digital platforms into a single, state-of-the-art, Nordic-scale platform for web and mobile, catering to all countries and most market segments.
- They currently see over 120 million logins per month in their app, which is one of the top-ranked apps in Europe.
- They’ve integrated sustainability and spending using AI in their app to translate spending categories to CO2 footprint, which helps customers make more sustainable choices in travel, food, etc.
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