ANZ Named Winner of the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2020 for Australia and New Zealand Region

Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the winner of the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2020 for the Australia and New Zealand region. Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited (ANZ) was honored at the Red Hat Forum Asia Pacific 2020 today for its exceptional and innovative use of Red Hat solutions.

The winners were selected based on the impact of their Red Hat deployments on their business goals, industry and communities, as well as the uniqueness of vision for the project. They displayed how open source platforms and culture have helped them improve productivity, agility and cost savings while empowering them to address future challenges and emerging trends more confidently and effectively. 

ANZ has been named this year’s winner for the Australia and New Zealand region in the categories: Digital Transformation and Cloud-Native Development.

ANZ is a multinational banking and financial services company with a purpose of helping to shape a world in which people and communities thrive. To achieve that goal, the digital customer self-service tribe needed to ensure that ANZ’s internet banking platform is always stable, reliable, and able to meet the needs of its wide range of customers including everyday consumers and small businesses right up to large enterprises.

ANZ’s internet banking platform uses a core banking application which since 2005 was heavily customized to its needs but has passed its end of life date and has been on extended support for more than 12 years. To future-proof the reliability and effectiveness of its internet banking platform, ANZ decided to adopt a containerized platform to remain architecturally aligned with the core banking platform upgrade path.

With the help of Red Hat Consulting, ANZ deployed Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Runtimes as the foundation of its internet banking platform in early 2020. Collectively, Red Hat solutions enabled the bank to implement the latest core banking application version (11.9) in production in July 2020 while running and migrating existing services from the original. ANZ managed to process AU$2.9 billion worth of scheduled payments within the first hour of implementing Red Hat OpenShift and the new core banking platform version in production. It also saw an increase in the number of internet banking users smoothly completing transactions during the peak hour of the first day of deployment. Additionally, ANZ was running 30 per cent of its customer traffic on the new infrastructure within four months of confirming the architectural decision. 

With Red Hat OpenShift, ANZ will be able to reuse the internet banking services that are upgraded and transitioned for the bank’s other channels such as its mobile banking application. This empowers the bank to run faster and deliver consistent user experience across multiple digital channels for its 2.4 million active internet banking customers. Red Hat solutions also enabled the bank to comply with the regulatory obligation of ensuring continued stability and availability of its critical customer-facing systems, processing approximately AU$1.2 billion in payments each day. So far, its unplanned outage time for internet banking has reduced by approximately 80 per cent.

The Digital Transformation category recognizes organizations that have successfully addressed IT challenges and delivered business value to effectively compete as a digital enterprise. The Cloud-Native Development category showcases agile methodologies and organizations that have most successfully illustrate superior overall performance in creating, maintaining and deploying successful business applications.

Supporting Quotes

Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, senior vice president and general manager, APAC, Red Hat
“2020 has been a year of uncertainties – but also possibilities. It’s inspiring to see how organizations in Asia Pacific are using open source to quickly and effectively meet changing market landscapes and consumer demands. Congratulations to this year’s winners, who we believe will become role models to other organizations looking for ideas to transform their business. We look forward to working with our customers to help them address the many real challenges our customers face today, and unlock the unlimited possibilities of taking the business forward.”

Raghavendra Bhat, lead digital, Tech Area, Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited
“The improved internet banking technology capabilities ensure our customers have the tools they need to easily complete their online banking so they can spend more time running their business or enjoying life. Collaborating with Red Hat to use its open source solutions means we can meet the scalability, reliability, supportability and security requirements to host our internet banking platform. Together we were able to build deployment pipelines that enable us to reuse code, rapidly test and retest deployment, as well as meet the stringent performance and volume testing criteria.”