When one of the largest banks in Australia set its sights on modernizing its financial systems, they knew they needed a smarter path forward. With a complex and heavily customized PeopleSoft General Ledger (GL) environment, and experience watching a competitor’s prolonged, costly move to Oracle Fusion, this leading institution chose Aptitude Software to help lay the foundation for a successful cloud GL migration.
From complexity to clarity
The bank’s core mission was to transform its financial architecture into a modern, cloud-enabled foundation—one that could serve its extensive retail, wholesale, and business banking operations. But first, they had to address the tangle of legacy systems, bespoke processes, and inconsistent data flows.
Their goals were ambitious:
- Consolidate to a single trusted route into the General Ledger, reducing reconciliation overhead.
- Remove 60–80% of GL-based accounting by moving those processes into an accounting hub and subledger.
- Clean up data and architecture before moving to the cloud.
- Deliver a higher level of financial data granularity to key consumers across FP&A, Risk, Treasury, and Regulatory Reporting.
Why the Bank chose Aptitude
The Bank conducted a rigorous evaluation of market options and ultimately chose Aptitude Software as their strategic partner for several key reasons:
1. A purpose-built Subledger for Banking
Aptitude offered the only subledger capable of handling the complex, high-volume accounting needed at a granular level. Unlike competitive solutions, Aptitude could handle FX revaluation, hedge accounting, P&L sweeps, and netting within the subledger itself—without forcing these processes into upstream systems.
2. Minimal disruption, maximum flexibility
The bank needed a solution that could flex to meet their unique needs—without a wholesale reengineering of their source systems. Aptitude’s rules engine and data enrichment capabilities allowed them to drive value and maintain flexibility, while reducing disruption to the broader transformation program.
3. Banking expertise baked in
Aptitude’s Banking Data Model, developed over decades of experience with global financial institutions, was a standout differentiator. Rather than relying on generic frameworks and consulting toolkits, the bank could start with a mature, purpose-built model—speeding up delivery and reducing risk.
4. Full transaction traceability
Aptitude’s approach enabled 1:1 transaction-to-journal posting into both a hierarchical subledger and summary-level GL feeds. This delivered full transparency and traceability from the GL down to the trade-level details—a major win for financial control and reporting.
5. Simplified accounting rule management
With Aptitude, the bank was able to reduce its accounting rules by 70%, simplifying maintenance and reducing the risk of error. In contrast, the alternative vendor’s approach would have increased the ruleset by 2.5x—creating unnecessary complexity and cost.
6. Unmatched performance at scale
At peak volumes, Aptitude’s solution demonstrated the ability to process over 200 million transaction lines in a short period, ensuring the finance team could meet tight period-end deadlines and deliver timely, accurate data to the business.
Life after go-live: A modern, high-performance foundation
Since go-live, the results have been transformative:
- Moving fast to 85 source systems connected to the subledger
- A single source of financial truth established in the subledger
- 170 million accounting events processed from 85 million transactions in under 2 hours
Today, the Aptitude Accounting Hub (AAH) is the most performant solution in the bank’s finance stack—delivering real-time financial intelligence and powering everything from strategic reporting to regulatory compliance.
