Desjardins Group saves millions and simplifies app development

With a reputation built on service, Desjardins helps millions of Canadians with their banking needs
Founded in 1900, Desjardins Group is the largest cooperative financial group in Canada, with approximately $250 billion in total assets. The company offers its seven million personal and business members and clients a comprehensive range of financial services, including bank accounts, loans, credit cards, brokerage services, insurance, and payroll management. Desjardins has an unmatched reputation for social responsibility and reliability, and has been ranked first in North America in Bloomberg’s World’s Strongest Banks.

Desjardins’ legacy platforms and applications were costing millions in support and maintenance
Due to its size and diversity of services, Desjardins needs a large number of custom applications to keep its business running smoothly. Many of these applications support specific departments, or are used to provide services from one department to another. As with many large institutions, Desjardins’ applications grew organically without centralized planning. As a result, Desjardins had more than 3,500 individual applications running on legacy platforms such as Lotus Notes and Microsoft Access.

As the number of applications grew, so did the cost. Desjardins found that it was spending several million dollars a year on support, while also maintaining hundreds of servers to run the applications. The breaking point came when its existing application platform reached its end-of-support policy, requiring Desjardins to pay extended support fees to its platform vendor.

ServiceNow powers rapid development and a modern platform, reducing costs for Desjardins
Desjardins decided to migrate to a modern application platform. It also saw an opportunity to reduce thousands of similar legacy, non-mission-critical applications to a few hundred shared applications that could be used across the entire business. Desjardins chose the ServiceNow® App Engine after evaluating several application platforms.

“We needed a rapid application development platform so we could consolidate and migrate our applications quickly. We also wanted the platform to run in the cloud, so we could eliminate high hardware and platform maintenance costs,” says Jean-Pierre Thibert, RADev Center and Shared Services Director at Desjardins. “ServiceNow was the clear winner.”

Desjardins consolidates hundreds of applications on one consistent platform
Desjardins has already migrated more than 30 legacy non-mission-critical applications to ServiceNow, and expects to migrate another 50 within the next nine months. Already, Desjardins is using ServiceNow to determine commissions, log sales representatives’ car mileage, and even collect charitable donations for the Desjardins Foundation.

The remaining applications will be migrated over the following year, leaving Desjardins with a few hundred streamlined, centralized applications—rather than struggling with what was more than 3,500 distributed applications and databases.

“Moving to ServiceNow has given us a consistent structure for our applications, and it allows us to easily share data and documents—something we just couldn’t do with Access and Excel-based tools,” says Jean-Pierre.

With ServiceNow, Desjardins delivers the right applications for business faster
Jean-Pierre has also been impressed with how easy it is to develop with App Engine on the Now Platform. “ServiceNow development is three times faster than traditional application development, and it’s also faster than developing on Lotus Notes,” he says. “New developers get up to speed in 10 days or less, and they can use their existing web development skills such as JavaScript.”

ServiceNow also makes it much easier to engage with business stakeholders. “After each sprint, we validate the new application version with the end user,” explains Jean-Pierre. “It’s really simple to make changes based on their feedback—which means that we end up with the right product more quickly.”

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