By Dr. John Gøtze, Chair of the awards jury

As a finalist of IRMUK’s Enterprise & Business Architecture Best Practice Award 2025, Tatra banka stands out as a world-class enterprise architecture practitioner. We have interviewed their lead enterprise architect Peter Filip.

Background

Founded in 1990 as the first private Slovak bank, Tatra banka has grown from a start‑up to the market leader in corporate banking and a top‑three player in the Slovak retail segment. The institution operates two brands: one offering a full retail and corporate portfolio, the other targeting a specific retail segment—while also balancing both group‑wide and local IT solutions as part of the Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI) network. This dual‑brand, dual‑stack model makes the technology landscape inherently complex.

Architecture Leadership

Since 2019, Peter Filip has served as Lead Enterprise Architect. His mission is to provide architectural vision and governance that translate the bank’s strategy, “Transform continuous innovation into superior customer experience” into resilient systems.

Challenge: Escalating Digital Complexity

By 2022 the bank’s business and IT environment had exploded in scale: more products, vendors, components, regulatory demands, and cyber‑security threats. Every change was becoming larger, riskier, and slower. Peter Filip remarks, “Our exceptional customer experience depends on an architecture that lets us deliver change rapidly. Complexity was threatening that promise.”

Strategy: Embed EA in Agile & DevSecOps

Rather than treating Enterprise Architecture (EA) as a standalone discipline, the bank decided to fuse it with the agile delivery model and DevSecOps tool‑chain.

“Enterprise Architecture must enable faster and safer delivery, not sit on the sidelines,” says Filip.

Key design principles

1. 1. 1. Single source of truth – All architectural artefacts captured in a BiZZdesign repository serve as a digital twin of the IT landscape.
   1. 1. Bidirectional data flow – APIs push and pull data between the repository, Jira backlogs, Git, and the CI/CD pipeline, so documentation stays current automatically.
   1. 1. Self‑service for architects – Guild meetings, learning sessions, and a shared design workspace give every architect the skills and forum to decide quickly.
   1. Automation first – Metadata stored during solution design drive downstream automation such as cloud tagging and firewall rule generation.

Implementation Highlights

Integrated backlog & design
During sprint planning, Jira tickets are imported into the EA repository. Architects assess impacts and model solutions in ArchiMate. The resulting viewpoints are then written back to Jira as epics, stories, and tasks, eliminating manual translation.

Cloud tagging as code
A nightly job exports YAML files containing authoritative tags for every cloud resource. The provisioning pipeline consumes the file to label new infrastructure consistently.

Zero‑trust firewall automation
Because the repository knows every application‑to‑application dependency, scripts generate 90 percent of the necessary firewall rules automatically, cutting lead time from days to minutes and avoiding trial‑and‑error outages.

Results

• • • Stable Time‑to‑Delivery (TTD) – Despite a rising change volume, median TTD has remained flat since 2021.
  • • Financial impact – Profit before tax rose 17 percent in 2024, supported by faster time‑to‑market for fee‑generating features.
  • Audit confidence – Always‑up‑to‑date architecture views shortened regulatory audits by 30 percent.

Stakeholder Perspectives

Martin Kubik, CIO and Board Member

“I value having architecture by my side for any strategic idea. The team’s data‑driven governance removes friction from change management. Without that capability, the bank would not be as successful.”

Günther Kraehan, Group Head of EA at RBI

“Tatra banka has long set the pace for architectural governance in our network. Its recent investment in automation clearly pays off through shorter time‑to‑market and higher business value.”

Sustainability

To keep the model healthy, the bank follows two rules:

1. 1. 1. Benefits must flow back to architects – Each data field is recorded only if it later saves design or analysis effort.
   1. Self‑healing data quality – Processes that consume repository data (cloud tags, firewall rules) immediately reveal omissions, prompting architects to correct gaps before production.

As a result, the repository remains complete and current “at every moment in time,” says Filip.

About the IRM UK Awards and the Conference

Tatra banka’s architecture-led transformation is just one of the standout stories being recognised at the IRM UK Enterprise & Business Architecture Conference Europe 2025, co-located with the Business Change & Transformation and Service Design conferences.

As a finalist for the Enterprise & Business Architecture Best Practice Award 2025, Tatra banka is part of an international cohort redefining how architecture drives innovation, alignment, and agility across complex ecosystems.

📅 Awards Presentation
Monday, 16 June 2025 | 🕘 09:50 – 10:05 AM

🏆 Finalists – Enterprise & Business Architecture Best Practice Award 2025
• The King’s Trust® – Ryan Preece, Deputy Chief Technology Officer & Jessica Smallwood, Enterprise Architect
• Riot Games – Nelson Gama, Lead Enterprise Architect
• Tatra banka – Peter Filip, Lead Enterprise Architect

The IRM UK Awards shine a spotlight on organisations elevating enterprise architecture from a technical discipline to a strategic enabler—through automation, collaboration, and measurable business value.

Let’s celebrate the practitioners building architecture that works in the real world.

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