When Dutch multinational bank ABN AMRO set out to reinvent itself as ‘a personal bank in the digital age for the resourceful and ambitious’, its software quality assurance teams found themselves at the heart of the transformation.
From its Amsterdam headquarters to Hong Kong and Sao Paulo, the bank has been investing heavily in automation, continuous deployment and cloud-native testing, turning QA into one of its key strategic enablers.
For QA leaders in financial services, the bank’s main transformation offers valuable lessons. ABN AMRO has worked with Temenos for nearly two decades, moving from front-office wealth solutions into full core-banking and payments integration.
The goal, as Bas van As, Head of International Core Banking, explained, is “to bring consistency and standardization to our technology stack and so make it easier to innovate and modernize.”
That standardisation has allowed the bank to maintain a single code base across regions, ensuring regulatory compliance and easier test reuse.
Marnix Tummers, IT Director of Wealth Management, said this approach helps ABN AMRO “remain adaptable in fulfilling our compliance obligations in all our markets.”
The modernised core is designed for stability and scalability. “Our solutions need to be available, safe, and compliant. So, it remains incredibly important that we have a stable and reliable core banking system, because it also allows us to focus on managing our legacy technology effectively,” van As said.
Nowhere is the QA impact clearer than in payments. Working closely with Temenos on its Payments Hub, ABN AMRO has achieved an end-to-end testing capability that supports real-time and cross-border transactions.
“Especially in the payment area, among others, we have tried to leverage the product as much as we possibly can, and that has been truly beneficial,” van As noted.
Today, the bank can “run overnight regression for all the functional areas, hitting a 100 per cent pass rate with a single touch,” he added, calling it “an incredible achievement” as he went on to pointed out that “TCD gives us an agility and speed to market that we didn’t have before, which brings a lot more opportunities into play.”
Clearing division deepens QA with Levi9
The same emphasis on QA now drives the global clearing business. In late 2024, ABN AMRO Clearing Bank (AACB) signed a multi-year deal with Amsterdam-based software engineering firm Levi9 to enhance and upgrade its technology infrastructure.
Under the partnership, engineers from Levi9 will support AACB’s internal QA team to test, embed and roll out a range of software applications and digital infrastructure improvements from the bank’s hubs in the Netherlands and Romania.
Friso Westra, CIO at ABN AMRO Clearing, said Levi9 was chosen after a competitive process for its deep financial-sector experience and “strong AWS competencies.”
“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,” he explained.
“The added value of Levi9 has been impressive so far and promising for our collaboration in the future,” he added. The partnership includes testing a new cloud capability on Amazon Web Services, reflecting the bank’s shift toward distributed QA environments.
AACB’s CEO Rutger Schellens described the new IT hub in Iași, Romania, as “an important step towards our aim to utilise global IT talent and stimulate innovation.” With Levi9 also based in Iași, the co-location will “make the collaboration more powerful,” added Westra.
Angelina Best, CEO of Levi9, said she is “simply very proud” of the agreement. “It reinforces our established expertise in the financial sector allowing us to push the boundaries of innovation even further.”
Cloud and compliance
The deal with Levi9 follows a series of moves by the wider ABN AMRO Group to consolidate and modernise its software infrastructure.
The bank recently partnered with nCino and Commercial Banking Applications (CBA) to strengthen its QA and digital-resilience framework.
According to Sumitra Moeller, Head of Financing Solutions at ABN AMRO, the adoption of nCino is intended “to offer a digital experience” and “to be compliant by design.” The implementation, supported by Accenture, aims to unify multiple legacy systems into one platform.
Meanwhile, ABN AMRO’s trade-finance operations have adopted CBA’s IBAS Transaction Due Diligence (TDD) software to automate transaction monitoring and compliance testing. CBA said the platform allows the bank “to immediately detect any unusual behaviour, helping to combat financial crime and ensure full compliance with national and international regulation.”
For a bank that operates in more than 30 markets worldwide, with assets of roughly €385 billion, the QA challenge is immense.
But by embedding automated testing across its core, payments and clearing systems, and by extending QA partnerships into the cloud, ABN AMRO is setting a new benchmark for quality engineering in European banking.
Technology, as van As was keen to emphasise, “does allow ABN AMRO to innovate quickly by bringing new features to clients and simultaneously strengthen regulatory compliance.”
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