Banca Caboto is a financial company focused on capital markets. A merger with Banca Intesa necessitated an objective review of the health and structure of existing applications and systems, including those managed by outsourcers. CAST empowered this critical assessment and is now used for regular reviews to measure and control application quality.

2. Context
I Dott. Bettini, could you first explain to us the business of Banca Caboto ?
Banca Caboto is a financial company established in 1948; in 1992 it joined the Ambroveneto
Group, through which it joined Banca Intesa, Italy's largest banking group, in 2001.
As part of Gruppo Intesa, Banca Caboto’s business is focused on capital markets. Our customers
are mainly institutional investors, insurance companies, credit institutions, large public and private
companies, as well as the distribution networks of banks and financial services providers.
The merger with Banca Intesa has led Caboto to be restructured to rationalize the Group's
investment banking activities. The most important parts of its core business were maintained and
expanded, incorporating several strategic sectors from the parent company. Of course, the IT
organization of Banca Caboto has also been impacted by this rationalization.
I Could you describe to us your position within the IT Department of Banca Caboto?
I personally work within the DOF (Finance Operations) organization and I’m in charge of
“Application Development and Governance” for the Finance department.
The problem
I What were the major challenges you were facing?
In 2005, Caboto’s IT department was merged into Banca Intesa’s IT organization in charge of
managingFinance.TheresultwasthecreationofonesuperITstructuresupportingtheentireFinance
unitofGruppoIntesa.Ofcourse,suchamergerrequiredafullunderstandingoftheexistingsystems
sothatwecouldmakethemostappropriateandobjectivedecisionsintermsofapplicationportfolio
and strategy.
We thus needed to get an objective assessment of the health and structure of the back-office
applications to be able to identify the redundant areas of the Caboto applications with the new
system. Mainly, we wanted to answer the following questions:
CAST forum
on Application Intelligence
Interview with Dott. Paolo Bettini,
Head of Application Development and
Governance at Banca Intesa
T E S T I M O N I A L
A C H I E V E I N S I G H T. D E L I V E R E X C E L L E N C E .
“This objective
information was critical
to us since we were in
the middle of the
merger and had to
make decisions
regarding actions
linked to corrective
and evolutive
maintenance.”

3. • What is the quality of the applications and how should it evolve in the future?
• Are these applications easily maintainable, and how much workload should we forecast?
• Which will be the critical factors to consider when introducing new functionalities?
As you know, it is a big challenge to assess strategic applications developed years ago. Most often
the teams have changed, the technical documentation is incomplete or out-of-date: the technical
knowledge of the application had vanished.
Toovercomethesechallenges,weobviouslyrequiredanin-depth,objectiveandholisticviewofour
existing information system made up of very complex applications, various technologies and
managed by several outsourcers.
The Solution
I What prompted your interest into the CAST Application Intelligence Platform?
Within this context, we looked for solutions which enabled us to quickly get an accurate and
objective knowledge of our applications as well as the ability to evaluate the risks coming from
integration activities in order to manage them proactively. We also wanted to ascertain the status
of the outsourced applications at each delivery, focusing on quality and maintainability.
We found that CAST was a key player in providing Application Intelligence solutions and could see
its platform was unique in matching our specific business needs: one single solution to provide us
with an in-depth analysis of our application portfolio (10 applications totalling about 3 million lines
of code) made up of different development languages and technological environments (Oracle
PL/SQL, Java/J2EE).
I How did you implement the CAST Application Intelligence Platform within your
organization?
For the implementation itself, we tried to avoid monopolizing internal resources. We chose to use
CAST’s consultants to perform a series of technical audits of our applications over a period of 21
months to assess and monitor the technical quality of our business applications’ modules over
time.
These assessments provided us with unbiased metrics and information we could easily access
using various drill-down views (by application area, single application, application module and by
technology) to rapidly acquire a satisfactory level of knowledge about our application portfolio in
termsoffunctionalandtechnicalcomplexity,adherencetoarchitecturalstandards,bestpractices,
etc...
This objective information was critical to us since we were in the middle of the merger and had to
make decisions regarding actions linked to corrective and evolutive maintenance. Given the
importance and complexity of the application, it would have been impossible to obtain objective
criteria of this sort without automation. We discovered that CAST allowed us to automate these
assessments and provided us a much more complete technical coverage than what could have
been done manually.
Today we have set up quarterly assessments in order to measure and control qualitative metrics
about the health of our applications and the trends in terms of technical complexity over time.
Concretely, this is how we conducted each application assessment:
• First, the CAST consultants interviewed our application experts to define the objectives of the
assessments
• Then, we launched the analysis of the applications using the CAST Application Intelligence
Platform in order to check the metrics, best practices and development standard rules we had
decided to monitor
“Given the importance
and complexity
of our applications,
it would have been
impossible to obtain
objective criteria
of this sort without
using software.”

4. “CAST increased
our confidence in our
outsourcers’ ability
to adhere to project
milestones.”
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• Once this analysis was done, the CAST consultants work with the IT Managers in charge of the
applications to identify the strengths and weaknesses for each indicator and launch corrective
actions
The Results
I What were the business results of these assessments?
These regular assessments have brought us two types of benefits:
1 From an internal point of view, we are now proactively managing the application portfolio, in
terms of complexity and quality, and our Application Governance process has brought
immediate results. .We have noticed a clear reduction of the complexity of the applications,
increasingmaintainabilityandmoreadherencetothestandardsandbestpracticesprescribed.
This had immediate positive effects on our responsiveness to business demands and our
costs – both for the short and the long term.
2 Moreover, these assessments also enabled us to monitor our outsourcers, by assessing the
quality of their deliverables, and even to benchmark them – which should help us in making
future choices to reduce the number of providers. The deadlines for the merger being critical,
CAST allowed us to ensure that our projects would be delivered on time and on budget. That
was the first priority and CAST increased our confidence in our outsourcers’ ability to adhere
to project milestones. The information we gathered also offered us the reassurance that the
requested corrections were well implemented and the confidence that the level of quality of
applications would remain stable over time, which was key in terms of maintenance budgets.