NBP, Pakistan’s largest government-owned bank, serves private and commercial customers and also acts as the government treasury bank. This means that it handles all government transactions—including disbursements and cash collection. In the past, every government transaction had to be handled physically through the NBP branch network. But in a populous country like Pakistan, managing the huge volume of financial transactions is a big task, especially if a single bank is the only conduit. While we’re still in the early stages, here are a few ways that we’re actively working to find solutions that overcome these challenges. 

Using APIs to increase access
Our digital banking implementation team, which includes product developers and a small in-house think tank, is responsible for developing new technology and out-of-the-box solutions tailored to the requirements of different areas of the bank. Our implementation partner Abacus played a key role in evaluating and implementing Apigee for NBP.

Recently, we developed a plan to open up the NBP government mandate to other banks and third-party fintech partners. Under this new model, instead of relying solely on our own channels, customers can now transact through fintech apps and other approved Pakistani banks. To be able to roll out a solution that would be reliable, scalable, and secure enough to meet our needs, we adopted Google Cloud’s Apigee API management platform. This platform allows us to accelerate our product development, so that we can compete in the fintech space. It also gives our customers access to a wide range of banking services through our own and partner channels.

As a government bank, NBP has to deal with a lot of procedural hurdles, which have slowed down our entry into the fintech market. Additionally, legacy systems required us to develop solutions for each particular channel and use case. APIs and API management increase the reusability of our services, while also bringing ease and speed of getting our services to market. In fact, we’ve seen the time it takes to offer a new solution reduced by 20%. Apigee not only helps us to achieve our go-to-market goals—it enhances our capacity to capture new and unique use cases across multiple channels. We appreciate the speed, agility, and security that Apigee brings us, along with its many out-of-the-box features. 

Reducing barriers to consumer services
One example of how we’re using Apigee is our passport collection use case. In Pakistan, to obtain a passport, citizens have to visit an NBP branch. This can involve waiting in long lines to deposit the government-required passport insurance fee. The sheer volume of these transactions was overwhelming our local branch teams, and costs for this type of manual transaction were high. Furthermore, the government had problems reconciling the fee collection with the passport transactions. 

To address these concerns, we developed an API that allows not only NBP branches, but also third-party banks and fintechs, to accept passport issuance fees.Customers can now visit the bank or fintech provider of their choice, reducing the load on NBP, while the government passport department inspectors can now easily reconcile these transactions. 

We also developed a bill payment solution with Apigee that gives customers the possibility of paying utility bills online. Previously, the NBP process was inefficient. We had an in-person bill payment mechanism operating in our 1,500+ bank branches. Now, we’ve integrated the payment API with the branch channel so that bill payment is automated, whether it takes place in a branch or online. 

Increasing the API footprint inside and outside the bank
Now that we’ve implemented the Apigee platform, our partner ecosystem is benefiting from it and growing, too. We’ve enrolled a wide range of fintechs that are developing products in the corporate payment space. We’re also planning to partner with several incubation centers to provide our APIs via sandbox environments, once our Apigee developer portal goes live. Other fintechs will be enrolled through the incubation centers as well. Finally, alternative third-party partners, such as fintechs and banks, will consume our APIs and/or partner with us for product development.

We’ve currently published 10 APIs and by the end of this year, we expect to have 25 to 30 live. We’re looking forward to implementing monetization, but not necessarily with revenue as the primary focus. As NBP is a government-owned bank, we have a responsibility to act as a catalyst for smaller players, and we see monetization expertise as an opportunity for fulfilling our mandate to help fintech startups grow and mature. In the long run, API revenues will certainly become more important, but the short-term goal is seeding innovation in the marketplace and providing the best possible retail banking experience for our customers, nationwide.

Editor’s note: Today’s post is a Q&A with the VCCP London and VCCP CX team. VCCP London conceived of and built the Cadbury Worldwide Hide platform using Google Maps Platform as a way to get consumers ‘hiding’ eggs and engaging with loved ones during a time when they could not be physically together.

How did the team come up with the idea for the ‘Cadbury Worldwide Hide’?

VCCP London is the agency of record for Cadbury both locally in the UK and centrally with the Global team. So, when Cadbury briefed us in May for their Easter 2021 campaign, they wanted us to come up with a creative way to encourage people to hide eggs and get consumers excited about interacting with loved ones. At the time, the pandemic was constantly changing, and it was looking like we were going to continue to be in lock-down for the foreseeable future, into the Easter season.

We then came up with an idea: wouldn’t it be really cool if somehow you could still hide a real Easter egg for someone you love, but do it virtually. And then once it’s found, that real egg could be delivered to the seeker’s home. With the use of some creativity and technology, we brought this idea to life. The experience we developed allowed our users to purchase a real Cadbury Easter Egg, hide it virtually on the map in a special location, then write the recipient a personalized clue for him to find the egg. Once the seeker found the egg, they would receive a real, physical egg the hider bought for her delivered to her home.

We wanted it to be a truly meaningful one-to-one connection, to bring back some lovely memories for people, and to allow a real chocolate egg to be hidden for a loved one no matter where they were.

Why was this important to Cadbury?

Generosity is at the heart of Cadbury’s brand, and Easter is our opportunity to show that ‘there’s a glass and a half in everyone’. As we enter the second year of our campaign ‘Show you care, hide it’, we are flipping the Easter ritual on its head and showing that the generous act is in hiding an egg for someone you love.

Physical connection has been restricted by the global pandemic and that’s why this year’s Easter campaign sets out to connect people across the UK through the power of generosity.

Tell us a little bit about the technical side of the project. Which Google Maps Platform products did you use to create the user experience?

The Cadbury Worldwide Hide launched across 4 markets (UK, IE, AU, NZ) simultaneously. Integration with regional e-commerce and CRM partners brought the activation into the real world with chocolate eggs being delivered throughout the campaign as seekers found them.

Providing an engaging map experience to our users was key to the execution and by leveraging the Google Maps interface consumers already use on a daily basis, we were able to focus on our core campaign message. We built the platform using both the Maps Javascript API to render the 2D maps and the Street View API, which allowed users to hide their egg anywhere in the world for their loved one to find. We also used Place Autocomplete powered search allowing users to search for their favorite location while contextual hints kept hiders on track. Seekers were aided with a distance meter and hints system if they got stuck. Our Design and Engineering team used Google Maps Platform Cloud-based maps styling to customize the map.

To get the campaign to as many people as possible we prioritized accessibility throughout the site, from screen-reader support and relevant tab indexes through to full keyboard shortcuts within the map experience – allowing users to hide (or find!) their egg without ever using a mouse. Real user testing was done throughout the UX, design and development process to ensure best practices were being followed.

How long did it take the VCCP team to build-out the solution?

Discovery to the roll-out of the solution took about 7 months. Our Design and Engineering team started with a 4-week discovery phase in September 2020 where we developed a service blueprint that set the foundations of the project. By visualizing the entire process of a service from start to finish, listing all the activities that happened at each stage, and the different roles, actions, processes and systems involved, the blueprint allowed all stakeholders to align on the solution.

We started iterative cycles of development in November 2020, beginning with UX (prototype for user testing), UI (look and feel and customization of Google Maps using Cloud-based Maps styling), and then kicked off front end and back end development in December. We launched the Cadbury Worldwide Hide platform in early March 2021—just in time for millions of users around the world to enjoy ahead of Easter.

Did you experience any challenges as you developed the experience?

The biggest challenge was actually around adapting to change in plans in response to the desire to launch the platform across more markets than originally intended. During the development phase, we rapidly scaled up to develop the platform for Ireland, Australia and New Zealand in addition to the UK within the same timeframe.

What results were you able to achieve and how did you measure the success of the project?

One week before Easter Sunday, we had sold out of Cadbury Worldwide Hide chocolate eggs. There were over 2.26 million site visits with an average time spent on the platform of almost five minutes. Over 809k virtual eggs were hidden in total and 14.5k real Cadbury Easter eggs bought. The Cadbury Worldwide Hide platform was the number one Mondelēz International website globally, and a couple even used the platform for a marriage proposal!

Would you recommend this type of campaign and user engagement to other B-to-C brands, if so, why?

Direct to consumer capabilities are increasingly important for brands, particularly in the FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) space. Local lockdowns and restrictions on physical retail have accelerated our adoption of ecommerce. Not only have brands had to adapt quickly, but consumers are beginning to expect direct-to-consumer capabilities from their favorite brands. Cadbury recognized this behavior shift early. What the Cadbury Worldwide Hide did well was to innovate beyond the traditional DTC and ecommerce experience by gamifying the platform and enabling moments of human connection at a time when physical connection was impossible. 

What advice would you give to other agencies or brands thinking about creating user experiences with Google Maps Platform?

We learned a great deal taking on this project. Here are just a few highlights:

• Assume anything is possible.
• Our ‘Mobile First’ approach allowed consumers to access the platform from any device with consistent, engaging brand experience.
• Think big and beyond the traditional use of Google Maps and treat it as a foundation platform to build upon.
• Prototype and test early to validate your hypotheses. We created a technical proof of concept which enabled us to test using ‘real’ Google Maps and real people early in our design process.
• Don’t assume everything is accessible to everyone. You may need to build upon the ‘out the box’ functionality to ensure as many people as possible can use your solution.

For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.

Apps play a critical role in an ever-expanding range of healthcare services, as patients and providers increasingly expect streamlined, engaging digital experiences. This means that IT must become faster, more agile, and free from the constraints of everyday infrastructure management.

At Cardinal Health, we are continuously enhancing our technology to empower innovators across our organization as they strive to build connections across the continuum of care. Through our efforts, we have adopted a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline that powers breakthroughs and drives innovation. Our CI/CID pipelines use a combination of Cloud Build for foundational elements, as well as our internal DevSecOps platform, NitroDX, to deploy our application workloads built on Google Cloud.

This CI/CD pipeline powered the development of our Pharmacy Marketing Advantage (PMA) Commerce, which was built from the ground up on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), to provide independent pharmacists with a digital platform that expands online shopping capabilities for patients by offering more than 11,000 over-the-counter products. We also replatformed our Order Express tool, which is a simple, reliable web ordering application for independent pharmacists, from on-prem to Google Compute Engine and GKE, which allowed us to shift from quarterly releases to weekly on-demand releases.

Our application teams work in close alignment with our product teams and handle everything from basic software updates to more advanced cloud-native app development. We place tremendous value on our ability to empower our application teams, and we invest in tools and technologies to make them as efficient and successful as possible.

As part of our efforts to optimize applications and deliver engaging digital experiences for our customers and their patients, we saw the value of rethinking our approach to storage and overall IT administration. Working with the NetApp Cloud Volume Service (CVS), a fully managed storage service, and Google Cloud, we fundamentally changed our IT capabilities.

Accelerating app development

As a cloud-first company, Cardinal Health has embraced a managed approach to IT provisioning in many areas. When we offload responsibilities like infrastructure maintenance, patching, and updates, we enable our developers to focus on continuous innovations that directly impact the quality of patient and provider experiences.

We’ve made measurable progress in automating our CI/CD pipelines to simplify provisioning Virtual Machines (VMs), managing firewall rules, launching Google Cloud projects, and more. Our NitroDx platform also significantly reduced development time from weeks to minutes, improving the software delivery process and accelerating digital transformation.

Google Cloud is our primary cloud services vendor and has removed much of the heavy lifting related to server provisioning, firmware patches, and similar tasks. We rely on a mix of Google Cloud services, including Compute Engine, GKE, BigQuery, and Vertex AI to deliver patient-centric solutions. We also work closely with partners like NetApp to improve our storage management at a much greater scale and more efficiently than we could do on our own.

By using a combination of NetApp and Google Cloud solutions, we’ve been able to decouple storage from our underlying infrastructure to make better use of our resources and accelerate app development. When running on-prem, shared storage proved to be a time and resource drain.

If an application needed shared storage in our legacy on-prem environment, we had to communicate the requirements to an engineer and create a change control. And even then, if all staff and funding were in place to support the change, it would take weeks to complete. This held up projects and delayed our time to market.

We quickly overcame this challenge with NetApp CVS. Through this tool, we can delegate permissions directly within a teams’ Google Cloud project, allowing them to administer their own shared volumes. This translates to on-demand shared storage without operational complexities or the need for dedicated teams to manage it.

We were an early adopter of NetApp CVS, and we’re happy to have made that decision. In addition to cost savings and faster time-to-market, we can now provide our staff with more professional development opportunities. The team members who made up the dedicated storage team now work across the cloud organization, focused on innovation and enablement rather than maintenance.

A stronger foundation for developers to stand on

We constantly work to fill gaps at any point in the developer experience. Containerizing our apps and deploying to GKE has been a major part of this process, driving efficiencies through consolidation and improving our processes to keep our operating systems patched, updated and maintained.

In the past, it was also difficult for us to get reproducible or CI/CD pipelines into our application spaces. Now, we make things easier for application teams as we can provide a CI/CD pipeline for the containers themselves, automating more of the underlying technology to keep developers moving forward.

As we shift more traditional virtual machine (VM) workloads into GKE and leverage NetApp CVS for shared storage, our developers can more easily plug into file-based services. This further accelerates app development and deployments and fuels a more easily managed, efficient CI/CD framework focused on value, not system maintenance.

Smart, data-driven decisions

We’ve been impressed by how quickly we can aggregate data, analyze it, and uncover insights with BigQuery, Vertex AI, and Dataproc — at a speed that would not have been possible without Google Cloud. Vertex AI pipelines helped us automate and standardize our ML operations so data scientists can focus on innovating code vs. managing deployments. This allowed us to make improvements in areas such as more accurately predicting market demand and providing more relevant product recommendations to our customers.

To date, Google Cloud has collaborated with us on many projects, giving us access to early-release products, listening to our needs, and applying our feedback to their product development. Likewise, NetApp continues to work closely with us to expand what is possible with NetApp CVS, particularly with the types of data we can store and the ability to manage it easily.

It’s an excellent partnership, and our work with Google Cloud and NetApp helps us redefine the possibilities of app modernization in healthcare. We can continue to push boundaries of speed, agility, and success of CI/CD pipelines. It’s exciting to see what we are accomplishing today and what we’ll do in the future to constantly improve our customer’s digital experience.

Learn how integrated solutions with NetApp on Google Cloud can help you unlock the full potential of your data.