Lombard Odier, a global Swiss private bank founded in 1796, has partnered with MongoDB to further modernise its banking technology systems with generative AI and reduce technical complexity.
The generative AI-assisted modernisation initiative enabled Lombard Odier to migrate code 50 to 60 times quicker than previous migrations; move applications from legacy relational databases to MongoDB twenty times faster, leveraging generative AI; and automate repetitive tasks with AI tooling to accelerate the pace of innovation, reducing project times from days to hours.
The bank’s GX Program—a seven-year initiative designed to modernise Lombard Odier’s banking application architecture to respond to market developments—launched in 2020 with the goal of enabling quicker innovation, reducing potential service disruption, and improving customer experiences.
Lombard Odier chose MongoDB as the data platform for its transformation initiative. The bank initially decided to develop its portfolio management system (PMS) on MongoDB. The bank’s largest application with thousands of users, PMS manages shares, bonds, exchange-traded funds and other financial instruments.
MongoDB’s ability to scale was key to this system migration, as this system is used to monitor investments, make investment decisions, and generate portfolio statements. It is also the engine that runs Lombard Odier’s online banking application “MyLO,” which is used by the bank’s customers.
The bank engaged with MongoDB to co-build a Modernisation Factory—a service that helps customers eliminate barriers like time, cost, and risk frequently associated with legacy applications and eliminate technical debt that has accumulated over time—to expedite a secure and efficient modernisation.
MongoDB’s Modernisation Factory team worked with Lombard Odier to create customisable generative AI tooling, including scripts and prompts tailored for the bank’s unique tech stack, which accelerated the modernisation process by automating integration testing and code generation for seamless deployment.
“To enhance Lombard Odier’s business strategy, we developed a technology platform that draws on the latest technological innovations to facilitate employees’ day-to-day work, and provide clients with individualised investment perspectives,” said Geoffroy De Ridder, head of technology and operations at Lombard Odier.
“We chose MongoDB because it offers us a cloud-agnostic database platform and an AI modernisation approach, which helps to automate time-consuming tasks, accelerate the upgrade of existing applications, and migrate them at a faster rate than ever before,” said De Ridder. “Having up to date technology has made a big impact on our employees and customers while proving to be fast, cost-effective, and reducing maintenance overheads.”
In addition to PMS, Lombard Odier modernised multiple other applications from its existing Java application server to the bank’s next-generation framework. The bank then went a step further and worked with MongoDB to use generative AI on a marketing application called “Publications” to accelerate the code migration.
The bank’s developers were also able to use Modernisation Factory generative AI-based tooling and products to feed into scenarios during regression testing and automatically generate new code much faster than before.
“Financial institutions with as much history as Lombard Odier undoubtedly have large, complex legacy systems that have been supporting the business for decades. However, it is important for organisations to constantly evaluate these systems to understand if they are still serving their best interest today, and for the future,” said Sahir Azam, chief product officer at MongoDB.
