Discover’s Runway transformation is reinventing technology and ways of working

When the developers at Discover Financial Services identified an opportunity to make life simpler for customers—by further streamlining the process for adding a Discover card to a mobile payment service app—they jumped into action. The challenge: Some customers were asked to go through additional authentication steps, leading some cardmembers to abandon their efforts. The solution: A pull-provisioning flow directly integrated into the app to authenticate fast while helping to ensure security.

This innovative fix for improving the custom experience offers an example of how Discover, a leading digital bank and payments partner, is revolutionizing the way it works.

Discover is automating business processes and freeing teams to innovate, so it can deliver new functionality to customers and partners faster. Discover's people are leading the shift toward a product-centric culture driven by small autonomous teams working across lines of business to deliver value.

A driving force in this shift is a company initiative known as Runway, which aims to create what Discover’s Executive Vice President and CIO Amir Arooni calls a “radically agile mindset” across engineering teams to innovate faster and increase time to market.

The push to strengthen Discover’s technology capabilities began in 2020. As part of the Runway transformation, Discover teamed up with Oracle and Accenture—dubbed the As One Team—on a crucial digital program, the Modernization of Accounting Processes and Systems (MAPS).

“There’s a proverb that I love,” says Michelle Green, vice president of business technology strategy and operations, Discover. “‘If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.’ Working with Oracle and Accenture, we were able to go both faster and farther.”

In 22 months, the team implemented three standard cloud systems—two Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications and Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM).

Completed on time and under budget, and meeting strict quality standards, MAPS replaced seven highly customized on-premises systems, dramatically simplifying architecture and maintenance, and established product teams to provide ongoing systems support.

The payoff from the new platform has been significant. Discover accelerated access to financial reporting data so people companywide can manage expenses more effectively—and more transparently, thanks to enterprise views.

“We have an enterprise-wide strategy of moving to cloud, as well as simplifying our business technology estate,” says Green, who co-led the As One Team with Amanda Kreutziger, vice president of applications development. “You’d think it would start and end there, but for us it didn’t. MAPs provided momentum for further Runway efforts around data, innovation, value creation, and simplification.”

Under Runway, “Our engineers are more empowered to take ownership of their products,” says Liz McNair, senior manager and mobile product owner, Discover Consumer Banking. “They have greater autonomy to challenge the status quo and create solutions that make our customers’ lives easier.” (Hear directly from Discover team members here.)

Proof that the process is working: Discover now releases products four times faster than before.

Doubling down on automation is another priority, especially in testing and deploying code. More than 15 robotic process automation (RPA) bots have eliminated tens of thousands of hours in manual labor each year. Besides improving testing, this frees employees to focus on product innovations.

“The art of the possible is limited only by our imagination,” Arooni says, “by how our products help people have brighter financial futures.”

“People worked together to figure out the best path forward,” says Green. “Our Discover colleagues brought their business expertise, Oracle helped us understand the cloud application products, and Accenture helped us move from on-prem to the cloud in 22 months.”