Duncan Alexander, Global Product Director for Hogan Core Banking at DXC Technology, explains how Hogan underpins cards loans and deposits for leading banks while delivering continuous operations, strong security and compliance, and a clear path to modernisation. He shares how the platform is evolving with active active resilience developer tooling on zOS, API led integration, open data, and AI powered analytics to enable real time engagement and faster product delivery.
What is Hogan and what core principles guided its design to ensure it remains both robust and scalable for the world’s leading banks?
Hogan is an integrated core banking platform that processes trillions of dollars’ worth of assets per day. It provides the system of record for cards, loans and deposits for some of the largest banks in the world. Additionally we hold regular global, regional and 1-2-1 Hogan User Groups (affectionally called HUGs) that validate our strategic thinking and align our road map with clients’ goals to retain and optimize a robust and scalable platform.
Hogan from the outset was designed as a composable, functionally rich core banking solution operating on IBM zOS and Mainframes. For over four decades we have had a strategic partnership with IBM whereby we have aligned innovations from IBM with Hogan applications and a combined ecosystem of partners. With the new z17 and our mainframe hybrid cloud strategy that takes advantage of Linux on Z and the Telum chip, we have provided an exciting opportunity for banks to innovate whilst also remaining on one of the most secure, dependable, and scalable core banking platforms.
How does Hogan support banks in rolling out new products without disrupting existing operations?
Hogan provides the ability to create two active-active data centers which enable 24×7 continuous operations. With the ability to enable “pop-up mainframe” on the Z Linux partition developers can operate more efficiently and securely. Zero down time can be achieved through asynchronous data replication and synchronous applications replication. By deploying modern development tool kits and AI driven test automation, development can happen at greater velocity and quality.
With Hogan processing over $5 trillion in deposits and two-thirds of US card transactions, what architectural features enable that level of performance and reliability?
Hogan’s platform architecture, Umbrella, provides the ability with UMBPlex combined with IBM’s SYSPlex to enable continuous operations. In addition, Hogan is horizontally scalable and configurable to operate real time which reduces batch processing and with its costs. The latest version of Hogan Umbrella leverages enhanced efficiencies with respect to reducing processing time that is facilitated by the latest version of ZOS.
How do you approach security and compliance in a system that serves four of the top six US banks and three of the top four Australian banks?
Together with IBM there are advanced in-built security measures that come with the Mainframe platform. These include:
- AI Driven Threat Detection
- Secrets Management with IBM Vault
- Quantum Safe Security with additional cryptographic algorithms and improved key management to protect against future quantum computing threats.
- Automatic Data Classification to tag and classify sensitive data, reducing the risk of data breaches and ensuring compliance with data protection regulations.
In addition, we work with data protection partners such as Delphix and eXate to mask Personally Identifiable Information across the enterprise.
What strategies do you use to help legacy banks migrate onto Hogan from older core systems with minimal risk and downtime?
We have proven migration methodologies as do our clients. In North America Hogan is the fastest growing Core Banking Platform in terms of assets under management. This is because Hogan banks are and have been very acquisitive to drive their growth strategy. We provide propriety tools to facilitate seamless account migration to Hogan. This combined with Hogan’s scalability differentiates Hogan from its peers.
How does Hogan support real-time customer engagement and personalization in an age of instant digital banking?
Hogan is designed to operate real time and where data can be streamed into external data analytics engines and a “real time cache.” This is then made available to drive persona-based dashboards and enable internal and client facing channels to access the very latest “picture of truth” for accounts. This would, for example, enable a bank’s customer with a mobile application to look up their up-to-date transaction history and balance without touching the Hogan core. This not only reduces costs but improves the Net Promoter Score of the bank who can add fintech solutions such as spend analytics to their applications.
In what ways is Hogan evolving to integrate cloud-native architectures, APIs, and open banking initiatives?
The “APIfication of Hogan “is a central pillar of our strategy. This is happening in two ways. First there is a range of business functional APIs that enables the integration of channels and FinTechs to the Hogan Core that augments its capability.
And second, the use of RESTful APIs to create a new UI/UX for Hogan that will retire the old 3270 mainframe greenscreens. This is work in progress with the first delivery in Q1 2026. The investment will transform Hogan where depending on the current user journey, fifteen to over fifty mainframe 3270 screens will collapse into one user centric designed interface. This will address skills issues, speed up training and with embedded AI assistants, boost employee productivity in the banks.
Regarding Open Banking, our Open Data Access solution with event streaming will support the ecosystem of partners that a bank may choose to support. In this space we have partnered with Caspian One and provided support to them along with AWS to launch embedded finance solutions for the Canadian market. The Caspian One solution went live at the beginning of July, which marks a significant milestone in the evolution of Open Finance.
With partnering as a core value, Caspian One Open Data developed its robust open data ecosystem platform in collaboration with DXC Technology, powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). This cloud-native SaaS offering is architected using serverless technology to ensure maximum scalability, security, and performance. This ecosystem is hosted and managed through DXC’s Beyond platform; a next-generation SaaS management and hosting environment designed for agility and resilience. This advanced architecture means the framework can easily scale to meet growing demand while maintaining reliable performance, offering financial institutions of all sizes a highly robust and dependable open data solution.
How do you measure and ensure ongoing operational excellence and uptime for institutions that rely on Hogan for mission-critical services?
We have provided robust support to our clients for over four decades. We provide 24×7 support and swing into action whenever the cry for help comes. Across the Hogan client base there has only been one severity one incident this year that required our assistance and the clients’ configuration issue was quickly identified and a solution applied. Over 450 client staff have accessed our support portal so far this year and have downloaded over 380,000 items. This reflects the substantial number of application upgrades that the banks are undertaking, many of which are being done to prepare for acquisitions that they may make.
What role do data analytics play within Hogan to help banks derive insights on customer behavior, risk, and product optimization?
The application of AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) to Hogan data is truly transformative. For example, we have a working prototype called Umbrella Fraud that trains LLMs off the mainframe to detect card fraud. An API call from Umbrella to the IBM Telum 2 chip enables every transaction to be scored in real time, with no latency impacts on service levels. This enables 100% of the transactions to be scored in real time compared against an industry average of 10%. The real time streaming of data into analytics and AI engines will provide visibility across business functions that is required to truly enhance revenue management in a bank. It not only can track product performance but look for revenue leakages and makes corrective recommendations.
As DXC’s Global Product Director, what emerging trends in core banking are you most focused on for Hogan’s roadmap?
There are three key emerging trends that we are being asked by our clients to address. These are:
- Continuing the evolution of customer engagement and hyper personalization
- Building operational resilience through simplification
- Delivering strategic product initiatives through agile product innovation and agile employees
Building deep personalized customer relationships is becoming increasingly achievable through real time AI driven data analytics. This enables banks to improve segment and individual marketing and offer management through real time analysis. Both retail and corporate clients can be better served through spend analytics and real time fraud detection, which improves Net Promoter Scores. This is not always driving clients to digital only channels but also empowering branch and call center staff with the tools and dashboards to serve clients directly from a simplified “single pane of glass.” Additionally, banks can extend their offers through embedded finance and open data solutions and provide financial services to a wider audience and meet the needs of consumers.
Reducing complexity and risk through simplification of IT estates is another emerging theme. Through acquisitions and years of layering new technologies upon existing platforms banks have created extremely complex IT environments. Hogan offers a unique opportunity to consolidate into a single integrated core banking system in addition to offering a “multitenant” environment where subsidiary banks can operate on the same mainframe-hybrid-cloud. Real time 24×7 banking is achievable with the Hogan platform which enables banks to enhance their service by retiring older platforms and converging to Hogan. In addition, DXC offers AI Driven IT environmental management which improves operational resilience.
In a highly competitive market with new entrants, our clients’ desire for agility is heightened. Being first to market with innovative market share grabbing products is strategically important. This requires new levels of product development at speed. Our work with partners that augment the core are a direct response to this clearly stated need from clients. We also focus on advising clients on creating modern development environments on Z Linux that use the latest software development tools to accelerate velocity and quality of product delivery. Hogan is going through an extremely important rejuvenation both in terms of product enhancement but more importantly with our renewed commitment from our clients.
