ABN Amro Clearing Bank (AACB), the global clearing division of Holland’s ABN Amro Bank, confirmed it has hired software engineering solutions firm Levi9 to enhance and upgrade the bank’s technology infrastructure.
Under the multi-year deal, AACB and Levi9 will work together from their offices in the Netherlands and Romania to let tech engineers from the latter support AACB’s internal QA team to test, embed and roll out a range of software implications and digital infrastructure changes.
ABN Amro Clearing Bank, an international player in transaction processing, payment logistics and risk management, operates eleven offices around the globe and serves clients in around 35 markets.
The agreement with Levi9, a Netherlands-headquartered IT consultancy with over 1,200 staff in several European countries, also includes Levi9 will help ABN Amro Clearing test a new capability in the cloud, to be carried out on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Levi9 IT Services is a European provider of software engineering services with development and delivery centers across Serbia, Ukraine and Romania and headquarters in the Dutch capital of Amsterdam.
Friso Westra, CIO at ABN Amro Clearing, explained that Levi9 was selected following a competitive process. To the bank, the firm’s IT expertise, experience in the financial sector, strong AWS competencies, and an overall cultural fit with the bank were the key drivers.
“Our collaboration with Levi9 accelerates our operational capabilities and allow us to attract the best technology talent, which enables us to provide high quality solutions to our clients,” Westra said.
“The added value of Levi9 has been impressive so far and promising for our collaboration in the future,” he added.
Westra also pointed out that another reason the bank hired Levi9 is the latter’s close proximity to the city of Iasi, in Romania, where AACB has a major hub for its Eastern European operations.
In addition, the bank recently opened an internal IT hub in Iasi, with the aim of outsourcing work to Romania and to gain better access to talent that is relatively scarce in the Dutch market.
“The opening of our IT Services hub in Iași represents an important step towards our aim to utilise global IT talent and stimulate innovation,” said Rutger Schellens, the chief executive officer of AACB. “It will help us in realising our goals and mission.”
Levi9 has had a presence in Iași for nearly two decades, recently expanding its workforce in the city to just over 300 employees.
“So the fact that both companies are based in Iași will make the collaboration more powerful,” stressed Westra.
“Levi9 has a strong connection with the local market in Iași… and our collaboration with them will allow us to attract the best engineering talent in Iași.”
Also commenting on the new partnership, Angelina Best, the CEO of Levi9, said she is “simply very proud” of the agreement with AACB.
She said the deal “reinforces our established expertise in the financial sector allowing us to push the boundaries of innovation even further.”
Infrastructure upgrade
The Levi9 deal comes amid more efforts within the wider ABN group to upgrade and modernise its software infrastructure.
Only recently, AACB’s owner, Dutch banking group ABN Amro, turned to cloud banking tech provider nCino and Norway-based software testing provider Commercial Banking Applications (CBA) to implement an ambitious infrastructure upgrade in order to boost the bank’s digital resilience.
nCino has started work to streamline ABN’s operations and enhance its collateral management capabilities.
The firm’s tech plans to enable the bank to consolidate “multiple legacy systems into one platform, unifying its end-to-end process for both customers and employees”.
Amsterdam-based Sumitra Moeller, head of financing solutions at ABN Amro, said the bank selected nCino to “offer a digital experience” and to “to be compliant by design”.
Irish professional services giant Accenture helped to support the rollout of the digital solutions at the Dutch bank, Moeller said.
The nCino platform, which is being used by a range of European banks and financial institutions, offers a suite of software solutions including testing and tech portfolio management services.
The Dutch bank adds to a growing list of financial institutions to collaborate with the US-based vendor in 2024, including Canada’s Libro Credit Union, Australia’s Summerland Bank, and SME lender Shawbrook.
Due diligence software
Meanwhile, earlier this year, ABN Amro started testing and partly implemented due diligence software for trade finance transaction monitoring and compliance provided by Norway’s CBA.
The company’s IBAS Transaction Due Diligence (TDD) offering has been tested and deployed across the bank’s global trade finance operations to monitor transactions and meet all auditing requirements.
CBA, headquartered in Oslo, claims that its offering allows ABN to “immediately detect any unusual behaviour, helping to combat financial crime and ensure full compliance with national and international regulation”.
The implementation of IBAS TDD builds on an existing partnership between CBA and ABN Amro.
In 2023, both companies signed a five-year deal focused on speeding up and improving automation in trade finance operations.
ABN Amro is the third-largest Dutch bank, with headquarters in Amsterdam. Led by CEO Robert Swaak since April 2020, it currently employs around 22,500 people. With a net income of close to €1.9 billion in 2022, its total assets are valued at roughly €385 billion.
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