IT leaders at traditional financial institutions seem poised to become the disruptors rather than the disrupted in what has become a dynamic industry. And they’re taking advantage of enterprise open source technology to do it, building applications in exciting and innovative ways, and even adopting the principles and culture of startup technology companies themselves.

Open source supports massive scale

At Deutsche Bank, global head of cloud, application, and integration platforms Tom Gilbert is spearheading the continuing development of its Everything-as-a-Service hybrid cloud platform, Fabric, which works to speed building and deploying new applications across environments. 

During his Red Hat Summit keynote, Gilbert shared that every developer in the bank gets access to powerful technologies, and with the collaboration that comes with this new way of working, colleagues get new products in front of customers more quickly. With developers creating their own container images, new iterations of software come to the forefront at lightning speed. Rapid prototyping is available on demand. 

Deutsche Bank has deployed Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform as the foundation for Fabric, their containerized, microservices-based application development platform at the bank. They are in production running a hybrid environment, with on-premise IT suppliers providing data center services and Microsoft Azure for off-premises processing in the public cloud. Now, IT teams can take advantage of massive-scale resources across this hybrid environment because they have a standard and consistent Everything-as-a-Service primary directive which supports delivery of innovative banking services and improvements often the same day they are requested. And, with more than 25,000 production containers held on the platform so far, they are seeing the impact on productivity and collaboration. 

Out with the old, in with customer experience

Banks are also taking cues from ecommerce and social natives, like Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, and others to help them digitally transform into streamlined, fast, and always-innovating tech companies. That means letting go of isolated business and tech operations, heritage technology, and old ways of managing projects. 

As illustrated by another banking executive who spoke at Red Hat Summit 2019, it’s about helping customers live more and bank less, and making sure customers are happy every time they open an app and see that it responds well. If they aren’t, the bank wants to be able to see when and where customers drop off their engagement and quickly fix the problem before it becomes the norm. 

This bank’s work with Red Hat has been a major factor in supporting its open source endeavors to consistently deliver more reliable and industrial strength application releases, the executive said at Summit. Red Hat now runs over 50% of the bank’s workloads.  

Red Hat’s open source technology allows banks and financial organizations to excel at building scalable new applications, providing better user experiences, and turning out quicker service enhancements. All of this is possible through the use of the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, a hybrid cloud, Kubernetes application platform for unified hybrid cloud and multi-cloud management.

If you weren’t at Red Hat Summit, or couldn’t catch all the presentations, visit here for all the on-demand replays or customize your experience from a selected set of presentations for financial services. 


About the author

Described as a pioneer and one of the most influential people by CRMPower, Fiona McNeill has worked alongside some of the largest global organizations, helping them derive tangible benefit from the strategic application of technology to real-world business scenarios.

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