National Bank of Kuwait Elevates the Service Experience Through Automation

Established in 1952, the National Bank of Kuwait (NBK) is the largest financial institution in Kuwait, with operations in global financial centers across Bahrain, China, Egypt, France, Iraq, KSA, Lebanon, UK, Singapore, Switzerland, USA, and UAE. NBK prides itself on a history of excellence that it attributes to stable management, unequivocal strategy, consistent profitability, high asset quality, and strong capitalization.

Seventy years into doing business, “The Bank You Know and Trust” is now recognized for offering a full spectrum of innovative, unrivaled financial and investment services and solutions to individual, corporate, and institutional clients. NBK also enjoys a dominant market share of local and regional clientele and operates Kuwait’s largest overseas branch network.

NBK faced a variety of challenges across several dimensions.

Asset discovery:

• Manual inventory information and collection management with no centralized, automated data sharing across IT assets and multiple solutions
• An inability to predict and detect end of life and end of sales (EOL-EOS) breaches across its server infrastructure

IT service management:

• A sub-optimal end-user experience, with little integration and no single source of truth
• Low self-service adoption
• Lengthy issue resolution times amid a high volume of incidents and change management
• Significant time and effort required to maintain platforms
• Slow reporting and analytics impacted planning, forecasting, asset utilization, and service agility

Capacity optimization:

• Reliance on manual spreadsheets for capacity planning
• Lack of visibility and alignment across infrastructure capacity requirements
• Insufficient management of the risks and costs of overprovisioning

NBK was eager to improve upon these areas by centralizing its services into a single location and optimizing its support resources through automation, process integration, and embedded intelligence.

NBK has been a BMC customer for more than 20 years. To address its new challenges, the bank turned to a suite of solutions within the BMC Helix platform to consolidate service and operations management, reduce the toil of manual processes, and elevate customer and employee user experiences, including:

• BMC Helix IT Service Management (ITSM)
• BMC Helix Digital Workplace Advanced with BMC Helix Digital Workplace Studio
• BMC Helix Discovery
• BMC Helix CMDB
• BMC Helix Operations Management solution suite for integrated ServiceOps
• BMC AR System engine that allowed scaling beyond the IT department

NBK has enjoyed positive results across its key business concerns. BMC Helix Operations Management for ServiceOps allowed NBK to access BMC Helix real-time dashboards across the entire service and operations environment. The single pane of glass with a simplified user interface (UI) and analytics have helped reduce event noise and partially eliminate blind spots by prioritizing actionable alerts based on critical services and business impact.

BMC Helix Digital Workplace empowered the NBK service desk to build unified service catalogs used by the majority of the bank’s employees. BMC Helix solutions have also allowed NBK to:

• Maintain application and service models more efficiently with automated, reliable service reporting
• Streamline change management and configuration management database (CMDB) integrations
• Decrease mean time to complete and repair (MTTC and MTTR)

NBK also achieved benefits across its critical business functions.

BMC Helix Discovery and BMC Helix CMDB:

• Automated asset discovery and inventory management
• Integrated real-time scanning across the entirety of the production servers and network infrastructure
• Proactive detection of EOL-EOS breaches to reduce risk and blind spots

BMC Helix ITSM, BMC Helix Digital Workplace, and BMC Helix Operations Management:

• Established a single platform spanning ITSM and IT operations management (ITOM) for unified data, workflows, and applications with predictive capabilities
• Reduced number of service tickets and the corresponding effort required of the service desk
• Improved analytics and reporting capabilities that span the entirety of the BMC Helix environment, making it centrally accessible through BMC Helix platform dashboards
• Increased service availability with predictive capabilities to identify and avoid outages before they occur

BMC Helix solutions will empower NBK to continue improving its service level availability (SLA) and customer response times; optimize its costs and asset utilization, planning, management, and forecasting; and create opportunities for new application development. These changes will help the organization achieve further efficiencies that deliver positive outcomes for NBK associates and customers.