Union Investment + Magnolia
“Union Investment has relied on Magnolia as our central DXP for nearly a decade. The best-of-breed approach guarantees seamless integrations and maximum reliability. As equal partners, the collaboration with Magnolia is extremely valuable. Magnolia is essential in helping us reach our target audiences more effectively and supporting our growth on an ongoing basis.”
Established in 1956, Union Investment is an active asset manager based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, offering a comprehensive range of investment solutions across asset classes and regions.
Prior to migrating its digital presence to Magnolia, Union Investment operated individual infrastructures for 70 websites and portals with four distinct code bases. The migration project consolidated all brands’ multi-lingual sites and components, decoupled the user interfaces, and moved all applications into the Microsoft Azure cloud. At the same time, the marketing team at Union Investment implemented a new corporate identity and style guide.
The challenge
A complex architecture had grown over the years
For years, Union Investment had been faced with high operating and maintenance costs for its 70 brand and campaign websites. The number of websites and integrated applications per website – such as searches, financial calculators, and funds data – had grown, introducing complexity that made it more and more difficult and costly to manage. The time had come to consolidate Union Investment’s digital presence.
Looking to unify its code bases and technologies, solve the challenges of its coupled design, and overcome the burdens of manual user management, Union Investment decided to migrate all its B2C websites into one single Digital Experience Platform (DXP).
The solution
Implementing a one-DXP strategy
Union Investment consolidated 100 editor components, resulting in a joint set of 40 components that are now used across all websites. Putting the experience of its content authors into focus and to help with internal user acceptance of the new platform, Union Investment supported their business units with an automated migration using robotic process automation (RPA), eliminating most manual content migration.
Together with Magnolia’s partner PRODYNA, the architects at Union Investment implemented multilingual websites – including localized URLs – and enabled content authors to easily manage various content entities using Magnolia Content Apps.
A new beloved feature is the Single Sign-On (SSO) using Union Investment’s company-wide identity and access management solution, Azure Active Directory: Business units can now conveniently request Magnolia permissions so that manual user management belongs to the past.
In the near future, Union Investment will not only manage its B2C brand and campaign websites in the Magnolia DXP, but also operate several B2B portals.
Decoupling content management from content delivery in the frontend
One of the major pain points and cost drivers of Union Investment’s previous solution was the tightly coupled frontend implementation. Any change to the customer experience had to go through multiple iterations involving at least two external agencies.
Union Investment now follows a web component approach, eliminating all HTML, CSS, and JavaScript elements in its component templates. In many cases, Magnolia’s flexibility doesn’t require templates at all: Instead, Union Investment uses template logic in easy-to-code, easy-to-debug, and easy-to-test Java classes.
The team’s next step is to support static sites and fully integrate them with Magnolia’s visual editor.
A modern stack to the rescue
Independent of the DXP implementation, Union Investment decided to use Microsoft Azure to host their new applications. As Magnolia is cloud-agnostic, DevOps repositories and pipelines have been set-up to deploy Magnolia into Azure Kubernetes Services. Magnolia is easy to use for providing APIs for external services and also to access third-party applications (like searches, fonds data, and financial calculators). Union Investment is using Azure API Management as a central hub to connect Magnolia to other applications, and vice versa. In their current setup, Magnolia allows them to easily and fast scale vertically, but also to implement horizontal scaling if necessary in the future. Furthermore, Union Investment’s new setup facilitates multi-team development, providing dedicated Magnolia environments for each feature-branch, including a full set of test data maintained in a central Magnolia instance.
The result
Cost and time savings thanks to a versatile and flexible platform
By collaborating with PRODYNA and Magnolia to implement their one-DXP strategy, Union Investment optimized both editorial and end-user experience. They achieved significant cost reductions, with a decrease in both run-time and maintenance costs, as well as improved efficiency in implementing change and time to market for new websites. Thanks to Magnolia’s seamless integration of static web apps and a range of extendable headless APIs, Union Investment is now equipped with a flexible and future-proof platform. Moreover, running on a major cloud provider enables vertical scaling and the potential for future horizontal scaling.
