Top 4 APAC Bank Reduces Oracle Support Costs by 65% While Strengthening Security & Compliance 

One of the APAC region’s four major banks relies on a complex Oracle product landscape to support retail, business, and institutional banking operations across Australia and New Zealand. Facing rising vendor support costs, a growing backlog of deferred upgrades, and compliance obligations that could not be compromised, the bank partnered with Spinnaker Support to reduce spend, stabilize its Oracle estate, and preserve the flexibility to modernize on its own terms. The engagement began in 2020 and was recently renewed through 2028. 

The bank’s decision to evaluate third-party support was driven primarily by cost and security for the versions that Oracle wasn’t supporting or for which Oracle wasn’t providing security fixes. Oracle support fees had grown relative to the value the bank was receiving, and mandatory patching cycles were consuming internal resources without reflecting the bank’s actual support usage and value. The bank had also struggled to keep up with Oracle upgrade cycles. The complexity of its environment made each upgrade a significant undertaking. Staying current with Oracle’s roadmap was no longer practical. Third-party support offered a way to stabilize the environment, contain costs, and buy the time needed to plan the next phase of the bank’s technology strategy on its own schedule. 

As a regulated financial institution, the bank carried obligations under PCI DSS, Australia’s Essential Eight cybersecurity controls, and guidance from the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA). Any move away from vendor support required confidence that those obligations could still be met. Security was a central concern in the evaluation.  

Spinnaker Support has worked with major financial institutions across Australia, South Africa, Canada, the United Kingdom, the Nordics, and Southeast Asia. Experience supporting regulated industries and critical infrastructure was a factor in the bank’s selection. 

Spinnaker took time at the outset to understand the bank’s environment, its compliance posture, and how its internal support team operated before finalizing the engagement structure. To provide the level of coverage the bank needed, Spinnaker placed a dedicated on-site database administrator (DBA) within the bank’s support team for approximately two years, giving the bank immediate access to experienced engineers without an extended transition period. 

Spinnaker took over Oracle product support across the bank’s Australian and New Zealand environments, providing 24/7 coverage for break-fix issues, general inquiries, performance advisory, and security. The engagement covered Oracle Database 11g, 12c, and 19c across both entities. 

On security, Spinnaker reviewed each Oracle patch release against the bank’s specific environment and produced targeted guidance on which patches were relevant and which could be deprioritized. This reduced the time the bank’s team spent working through vendor advisories. Spinnaker also conducted security assessments of the Oracle environment, reviewing configurations, access controls, and default permissions to identify gaps and provide remediation guidance. This work supported the bank’s obligations under PCI DSS, the Essential Eight, and APRA’s prudential standards. 

The bank’s team had consistent access to the same senior Spinnaker engineers throughout the engagement. For critical issues, escalation went directly to senior management rather than through a tiered support queue. When a P1 issue required immediate attention, Spinnaker’s management joined the call within minutes. 

Spinnaker also worked with the bank on a critical payment processing workflow that had been taking several days to complete. After reviewing query execution patterns and providing tuning recommendations, the process runtime came down from days to minutes. 

The bank reduced its Oracle support costs by approximately 65% compared to what it had been paying under vendor support. It also avoided multiple upgrade cycles over the course of the engagement, which, at the scale of a major Australian bank, would have amounted to tens of millions of dollars in project spend. 

“Spinnaker gave us direct access to senior engineers who know our environment and are genuinely invested in keeping us running. When we have a critical issue, we are not navigating a call center; we have the right people on the line within minutes. That level of responsiveness is something we could never get from the vendor, and it has made a real difference in how confidently we manage our Oracle environment,” said the Head of IT of Top 4 Bank. 

Security and compliance obligations were maintained throughout the engagement. The bank’s Oracle estate remained stable as it works through a phased migration, and Spinnaker has provided continuity across that transition. The engagement expanded to cover environments in both Australia and New Zealand and has been renewed consistently. 

The savings have also supported a broader technology agenda. With the cost of legacy vendor support reduced, the bank has been able to direct investment toward digital transformation initiatives, including the deployment of agentic AI across its banking operations. For financial institutions managing legacy tech debt, this is often where third-party support has its most lasting impact: the budget freed up to invest in what comes next. 

For a major bank in a heavily regulated environment, the measure of a support partner is simple: are they there when it matters, do they know the environment, and do they make it easier to run the business. Six years in, Spinnaker Support has delivered on all three.