Banque Misr builds Egypt’s first digital bank with Red Hat technology

Banque Misr, one of the oldest banks in Egypt, wanted to build the country’s first truly digital bank to position itself at the forefront of its digital revolution. It established Misr Digital Innovation (MDI) with the objective of adopting a containerized approach that would accelerate time to market. Banque Misr and MDI selected Red Hat technologies from a range of options because of the excellent support offered by Red Hat experts. Together, Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus, Red Hat Satellite, and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform provide a robust, resilient foundation for digital banking applications. A new DevOps approach brings services to market quickly and allows updates and application deployments to take place without disrupting services.

Benefits: 

• Eliminated downtime when deploying or updating applications
• Provided uninterrupted stability and resilience
• Supported a DevOps approach for faster time to market
• Offered unlimited CPU subscriptions for OpenShift clusters, supporting rapid growth

Founded in 1920, Banque Misr is one of Egypt’s largest and oldest banks. It wanted to position itself at the forefront of the digital revolution by building the country’s first digital bank. Its objective was to boost financial inclusion across Egypt by giving customers instant access to the evolving digital finance landscape, and offering an easy, personalized customer experience.

The bank established Misr Digital Innovation (MDI) in 2020 to become Egypt’s first digital bank, following directives and regulations set by the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE). MDI would build innovative digital banking solutions tailored to specific demographics, and its native digital-only bank would embrace the latest technological advances to offer fully digitized banking services with the convenience of online accounts. Exploring potential approaches, Banque Misr and MDI decided that a container platform would best serve its needs.

“A container platform can scale automatically to meet growing needs and recover from issues automatically to avoid downtime,” said Tamer Elkady, Senior Manager of Infrastructure Services, Cloud, and Automation, Banque Misr. “Adopting a container approach would also allow us to optimize our resources and accelerate time to market for new services.”

In its search for enterprise container solutions, MDI built a proof of concept (PoC) with multiple leading container vendors.

Banque Misr and MDI decided to invest in Red Hat, with the support offered by the Red Hat team a critical deciding factor.

“We selected Red Hat technologies because of the level of support Red Hat provides and because Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus is simple to use,” said Elkady. “From our experience of interacting with different vendor support teams, we could see that Red Hat is different. Red Hat cares. Red Hat wants to identify the root cause of issues and offer preventive actions alongside enhancements.”

The team built a new mobile banking application on Red Hat technologies during the 3-week PoC. Local Red Hat partner, Linux-Plus, led the project, implementing 4 Red Hat OpenShift clusters on premise with support from Red Hat Consulting. “Red Hat experts helped us explore and decide on our architectural and storage options,” said Elkady. “They provided vital support during the implementation.”

Red Hat also reassured Banque Misr’s architecture and security teams about Red Hat OpenShift’s compliance with Payment Card Industry (PCI) and Center for International Security (CIS) standards, specifically with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes—a product included within Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus. PCI compliance covers the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) technical and operational standards as set out by the PCI Security Standards Council for protecting cardholder data, while CIS compliance covers security standards for protecting IT systems.

The mobile banking application runs on Red Hat OpenShift clusters, deployed on premise, and makes use of various related Red Hat technologies:

• Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, in combination with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security, provides the templates Banque Misr and MDI use to ensure all clusters are PCI- and CIS-compliant. At the same time, these Red Hat products also ensure fleet scalability and that workloads are resilient across multiple sites.
• Red Hat Satellite monitors compliance for Red Hat Enterprise Linux® machines against policies based on a customized CIS benchmark.
• Red Hat Quay provides a single resilient repository for hosting container images.
• Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform automates manual, business-as-usual tasks such as application deployment and user management.

The Red Hat PoC proved so successful that MDI moved it straight into production. Today, Red Hat OpenShift hosts 6 critical applications for the bank—90% of its workloads—including mobile banking and internal corporate functionality, such as communications and document management.

Banque Misr and MDI also recently acquired a Red Hat Learning Subscription (Enterprise Plan—ESP), which offers enterprise access to the latest software, support, and tools. The subscription gives Banque Misr and MDI unlimited access to Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus, which includes the Red Hat Quay container registry, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security, and Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation for storage management, and access to hundreds of courses, learning paths, and workshops.

While the bank follows the CBE’s mandate to run Red Hat OpenShift on premise in Egypt, its subsidiaries in Somalia and Saudi Arabia host workloads in Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS, capitalizing on the cloud-agnostic benefit of Red Hat OpenShift. It also runs Temenos Transact (formerly Temenos T24) on OpenShift Service on AWS for its branch in Dubai. “Being able to choose where we run our Red Hat technology is important,” said Elkady

Eliminated downtime when updating and deploying applications

With Red Hat OpenShift, Banque Misr and MDI can update existing applications and deploy new ones with no downtime. Clients visiting services hosted on Red Hat OpenShift don’t experience any performance degradation during the process, meaning they can take full advantage of cloud-native workloads and the scalability benefits of Red Hat OpenShift. This means updates and deployments can be rolled out at any time—even during the day—and more regularly without being restricted to defined windows.

“Software releases are faster with Red Hat than with our legacy virtual machine environment,” said Elkady. “It’s so easy to deploy into a test environment, then deploy into production—and with zero effect on the production environment.”

Provided uninterrupted stability and resilience

Banque Misr and MDI haven’t experienced a single incident with its OpenShift platform in the 3 years since the mobile banking application went into production.

“We have never had an issue with Red Hat OpenShift itself, only ever with the database, middleware, or other satellite systems communicating with Red Hat OpenShift,” said Elkady. “When we opened tickets, the support from the Red Hat team was excellent.”

Supported a DevOps approach for faster time-to-market

Red Hat OpenShift was the driver for Banque Misr and MDI embarking on a DevOps approach. DevOps plays a crucial role at MDI, with tooling like OpenShift Pipelines (Tekton) used in its digital factory, shipping code from development to pre-production. Its DevOps team is significant in size, spanning 3 floors.

“Without Red Hat OpenShift, we wouldn’t have created the DevOps department,” said Elkady. “We acquired OpenShift because it supports the DevOps approach to rapidly develop, test, and deploy to production.”

Offered unlimited CPU subscriptions for OpenShift clusters, supporting rapid growth

The ESP from Red Hat provided Banque Misr and subsidiaries such as MDI with unlimited central processing unit (CPU) subscriptions for their Red Hat OpenShift clusters, which is vital to future digital projects. The organization started with 150 virtual CPU subscriptions and, within 3 years, increased its consumption rapidly to around 3,500.

Having built the first digital bank in Egypt, MDI has many more projects in the pipeline, requiring many additional CPU subscriptions. Coupled with the Red Hat Learning Subscription, the bank can ensure growth both from a platform perspective and the knowledge acquired by the engineers.

“We need to be able to deploy new features and services at speed,” said Elkady. “The ESP provides us with unlimited CPU subscriptions that are vital to maintaining our leading position as a digital bank.”

In 2024, the Central Bank of Egypt granted Banque Misr preliminary approval to launch Egypt’s first digital bank. onebank, as the bank will be called, meets all regulatory requirements for receiving a digital bank license, including building infrastructure, banking systems, and security measures that will guarantee reliable digital services.

Banque Misr built onebank’s core platform on trusted Red Hat technologies, recognizing the critical importance of cybersecurity, data privacy, and regulatory compliance in today’s digital banking environment. By using Red Hat’s robust, security-focused solutions, onebank is well positioned to deliver innovative customer services, and is already deploying new features and capabilities. “We always keep up to date with the latest products available on Red Hat OpenShift,” said Elkady.

Banque Misr’s roadmap includes using Red Hat Application Foundations for application programming interface (API) management and exploring Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. Other plans involve using Red Hat Training to host on-site boot camps for Red Hat OpenShift and Ansible Automation Platform. This approach will bring together different teams with various responsibilities to enhance their automation and application development journeys.

Red Hat technologies, particularly Red Hat OpenShift, are a strategic platform for Banque Misr and MDI and its overseas subsidiaries. With each new project, Elkady and his team begin by asking whether it can be deployed as a container on Red Hat OpenShift.

“Thanks to Red Hat OpenShift, Banque Misr is one of the top 3 banks leading the market in Egypt,” said Elkady. “Red Hat OpenShift is critical to our future success as Egypt’s first and leading digital bank.”