European Central Bank (ECB)

*Note upfront: Sander Veenstra is expressing his personal views and not the official stance of the ECB.

The European Central Bank (ECB) is the central bank of the 19 European Union countries which have adopted the euro. More than 3,500 staff members work for the ECB in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. During the last 20+ years, the ECB has witnessed a shift from in-house software development to outsourcing to large system integrators, which has led the organization to understand and embrace the importance of software health.

The Challenge

• Staying innovative during the digital revolution in the payment industry
• Go-live deadlines often postponed due to unexpected fixes
• Ensuring efficient workflows to maximize value of taxpayer spend

The SIG Solution

• Deep insight into application quality to guide improvements for:
  • easier implementation of new requirements
  • smoother handover from development to test teams
  • contribution to better software quality
• Introduced TÜViT software quality certification as an instrument to build valuable relationships with software vendors
• Carried out software quality validations on applications

The Results

• Facilitating the switch to other outsourcing parties, due to objective measurements of software quality
• Clear objective quality as basis for more efficient Vendor Management
• Clear objective quality as basis for the definition of manageable SLAs
• Incorporation of the SIG/TÜViT Trusted Product Maintainability certification into its vendor contacts
• Incorporation of TÜViT’s certificate as requirement for objective software quality in tenders
• Tight cooperation with the system integrator and contractor
• Increased application quality, resulting in reduced build and maintenance effort, and thus lower costs
• Improved business efficiency
• Insights into cost estimations for improvements

“Modern banks have become high-end IT companies. Today the “black box“ character of many systems is still dominant, which often causes unexpected and costly problems and also quickly translates into reputation damage. Based on my experience, I can confirm that certification adds great value by making software quality transparent and it creates a neutral understanding and objective basis for improvement.”

– Sander Veenstra, Principal IT Application Development Expert at ECB