Cloud currency: Travelex leaves legacy behind
From administration to modernisation, with global IT director Hans van der Waal
Foreign exchange specialist Travelex entered administration in the middle of 2020. Today it runs its full IT stack in-house, employs more than 300 IT staff, and technology sits at the heart of the business.
Founded nearly 50 years ago, Travelex is practically a household name. Its retail outlets are ubiquitous, and it has partnerships with banks, hotels and airports.
But that long legacy has its own challenges, which were thrown into stark contrast when fintech startups like Starling and Monzo started encroaching on the company's traditional business areas with new app-based services.
The company had been trying to refactor its IT for years in the face of this rising competition, with limited success.
"There were some initiatives done in the past to rebuild or replace a large part of the stack with sort of a new monolithic, all-encompassing solution," says Hans van der Waal, the company's global IT director, who joined in March 2019.
"What you typically saw in those years - I wasn't there so this is hearsay - is that it took, let's say, two years and a lot of money, and then ultimately it didn't do what it's supposed to do, and they pulled the plug on it."
Cloud kicks in
When van der Waal joined, "everything" was on-prem. Datacentres in three regions hosted both self-developed and third-party systems. There were only two SaaS systems - HR and project management - but the company knew it had to do more.
"They were trying to do two things at the same time: moving to the cloud and modernising - or refactoring or rearchitecting - at the same time."
Travelex's hefty application stack of about 200 apps made that an "extremely difficult" task that could have taken "decades." That's when van der Waal came in.
The first thing he did was start a company-wide movement to Office 365, which "helped a lot in the pandemic," and begin migrating some of the company's Active Directory to the cloud. Everything was going well - until it wasn't.
Cloud currency: Travelex leaves legacy behind
From administration to modernisation, with global IT director Hans van der Waal
System shock
A cyber-attack at the end of 2019, plus COVID-19 shutting down travel, caused huge disruption at Travelex. Coming on top of the increased competition and IT challenges, the firm was forced to enter administration, although it kept operating after a debt restructure and new ownership. Van der Waal says it was the shock needed.
"It was a sort of a game changer in how we started to transform because it was very clear that we needed to accelerate our efforts, and also prioritise anything that makes us more resilient and less concerned with risk from a cybersecurity point of view."
It was here that Travelex formed a partnership with AWS - a decision made "very much around commercials and also because we were in the midst of the pandemic" - for both cloud computing and professional services, which helped the company migrate to the cloud "much faster."
Eventually van der Waal's team developed a programme to migrate nearly 95% of the remaining on-prem workloads to the cloud and decommission anything that was no longer needed.
"Ultimately I think we migrated about 600 servers, and we decommission about 1,000. It was very much a rationalisation and a lift-and-shift exercise."
This was an opportunity for the company to arrange its data locations; now the European business sits in one of AWS' European regions, its ANZ operations in an Australian region, and so on.
One region, China, presented a more significant challenge, due to regulations that make it legally difficult to move data out of the country.
"We had to go through, I think, three or four iterations of design before we came to something that was acceptable and also would work... It's not that we had pushback from the regulator, it was more about us as a combination of three parties [Travelex, network provider Checkpoint and local partner] figuring out a way to be compliant with local laws."
Cloud currency: Travelex leaves legacy behind
From administration to modernisation, with global IT director Hans van der Waal
Closing the silos
Travelex's transformation is still ongoing, but it wouldn't even have reached this point if not for a preceding business-level change.
"Initially [Travelex] was very much sort of a siloed organisation, where the front office staff and the commercial people and the product people were demanding all kinds of change and initiatives from IT, and then IT struggling to supply that," says van der Waal. "If everyone asks for things then it's difficult to prioritise and give good transparency and make things predictable."
That wasn't sustainable, so the company decided to reform the way IT operated, turning it into "part of the cross-functional structure" to deliver on roadmap items. Encouraging joint responsibility in this way made most IT operations - like maintenance, support and change - part of the same work stack other business units shared.
"[We are now] much more transparent and much more aligned. That sort of siloed demand-supply, that's probably how we worked in the past. With more agile ways of working, you see that alignment and transparency have massively increased."
Today the IT department makes a real effort to reach out across the business. "We have a newsletter, we post blog posts on our intranet, we do townhalls, we do very much face-to-face type of gatherings."
The results speak for themselves. With an integrated approach to IT - now all fully managed in-house but living on the cloud - Travelex is more prepared to face the next challenge than ever before.