APAC Financial Services Institutions Bank on Red Hat to Enhance Agility

Open source solutions can facilitate innovation, cost savings and risk management

SYDNEY, SIBOS 2018 -

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that financial institutions across Asia Pacific – such as AmBank Group, BTPN, Bank BRI, China Merchants Bank, Cathay United Bank, Fukuoka Financial Group – have adopted Red Hat’s hybrid cloud architectures and practices to become more agile while helping to reduce costs and more effectively manage risks.

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Open source is increasingly seen as a gateway to quick innovation. Banks are leveraging open source to bring to market new business models, product features, and product propositions – and allowing that these are done fast and reliably...”

Michael Araneta

associate vice president, IDC Financial Insights Asia Pacific

100% of commercial banks in the global fortune 500 rely on Red Hat[1] Financial institutions are using Red Hat technology to automate and optimize IT processes; simplify front, middle and back office process; facilitate application and data integration; and modernize application development for better customer experience.

The latest IDC Financial Insights research on the 101 Fast Growing FinTechs in Asia Pacific, covering 2017-2019 fintech to watch, highlights a rising level of commitment from traditional financial services institutions towards collaborating with fintechs or investing in them to build innovation competencies.

Financial institutions are often faced with complex transactions, growing volumes of data and increased regulation and may need to be more agile to better address consumer and regulatory needs for digital banking. This can call for an IT architecture and modern application development and delivery practices that can deliver greater speed, stronger security, and greater flexibility while also enhancing the way organisations work across the business, IT and their partners.

In APAC, several organizations have recently deployed Red Hat’s hybrid cloud solutions to help meet their needs, including:

AmBank Group

AmBank Group is one of Malaysia’s premier financial solutions groups with 43 years of experience. As part of its digital journey, the bank aims to provide better mobile banking and cash management in a manner that is easier, more simple and faster to its valued customers, across all touch points. To help achieve this goal, AmBank Group deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Red Hat Virtualization and Red Hat Gluster Storage with the help of Red Hat Consulting.

PT Bank Tabungan Pensiunan Nasional Tbk (BTPN)

PT Bank Tabungan Pensiunan Nasional Tbk (BTPN) has a vision to become the best mass-market bank in Indonesia, supported by digital technology. To increase its agility and efficiency, BTPN worked with Red Hat Consulting to refine its DevOps capabilities and deploy Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. With its OpenShift-based platform, the bank has accelerated its application development and deployment processes to help it gain a  competitive advantage.

Bank BRI

Bank BRI is Indonesia’s oldest commercial bank and the largest by assets, loans and deposits.  As an established bank, Bank BRI faced a legacy infrastructure that it found to be ill-suited for rapid changes required in its current competitive environment. To enhance its digital capabilities, Bank BRI looked to Red Hat for help in developing a hybrid cloud platform that can provide greater business agility. Using Red Hat Cloud Suite and support from Red Hat Consulting, Bank BRI has been able to build and deploy applications more rapidly and with better time to market.

China Merchants Bank (CMB)

China Merchants Bank (CMB) is China's first joint-stock commercial bank wholly owned by corporate legal entities. To modernize its traditional centralized structure and gradually move towards an open and flexible distributed architecture, CMB deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP) and Red Hat Ansible Tower to establish a standardized, process-oriented and automated platform. CMB also worked with Red Hat Training to equip its system administrators with the skills it needed to deliver the platform; many have now completed Red Hat Certification. The new Red Hat-based platform enables CMB to deliver personalized and mobile services to its active users.

Cathay United Bank (CUB)

Cathay United Bank (CUB) embarked on a digital transformation plan to keep ahead of foreseeable disruption in the financial industry. CUB decided to adopt Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat Fuse to implement a Platform-as-a-Service for its banking services, together with Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. This helped reduce the total cost of ownership,  improve the team’s flexibility in resource management.

Fukuoka Financial Group (FFG)

Fukuoka Financial Group (FFG) is a 140 year old regional bank in Japan. FFG has established a ‘Digital Strategy Division’ and is participating in a Red Hat Open Innovation Labs engagement to help accelerate its digital transformation to more quickly introduce new services to the market amidst competition with fintech service providers. At the heart of its digital services platform is Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

Supporting Quotes
Benjamin Henshall, director of sales, financial services, APAC, Red Hat
“The changes that are reshaping the financial services industry are providing financial institutions in APAC with opportunities to transform themselves to find new sources of competitive advantage. Red Hat’s open source solutions can offer an innovative, reliable foundation that can help financial institutions scale more dynamically, withstand failures, and adapt more quickly. This can help financial institutions focus on innovation and customer engagement while running their IT platforms at a lower cost of service.”

Michael Araneta, associate vice president, IDC Financial Insights Asia Pacific

“Open source is increasingly seen as a gateway to quick innovation. Banks are leveraging open source to bring to market new business models, product features, and product propositions – and allowing that these are done fast and reliably. Many of these new offerings require new application functionalities, new features or fixes that are deployed and redeployed quickly and continuously. The ability to innovate fast, and change just as quickly will be a key indicator for success for banks in the future.”

Datuk Iswaraan Suppiah, group chief operations officer, AmBank Group

“As part of our digital journey, it was critical for us to transform and innovate our services. By adopting Red Hat solutions, we were able to build up our digital capabilities with a more agile and scalable application delivery. This further helped us develop new applications and services to expand our market reach. We have upgraded our digital banking experience and services for our valued customers, making their banking experience with us more convenient and seamless.”

Karim Siregar, IT director, Bank BTPN

“With Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, we can now develop and deploy applications faster and more cost-effectively to take advantage of new market opportunities with innovative services. Digital banking is still a challenge for many banks in Indonesia and we had to disrupt ourselves to be more innovative. Our DevOps initiative backed by Red Hat solutions has helped us to adopt new technologies and develop our skills to enable our digital transformation.”

Indra Utoyo, managing director, Information Technology and Operation, BRI

“Our customers value speed, efficiency, and accessibility and so it was important for us to move from a  legacy infrastructure to the cloud. Using Red Hat solutions, we were able to deploy an enterprise cloud infrastructure which has made us more agile and cost-efficient. This has enabled us to offer new digital services to our customers and help sharpen our competitive edge.”

Zhang Xiang, supervisor of open system management office, China Merchants Bank

“We regard financial science and technology reforms as one of our top priorities for the next three to five years. With Red Hat solutions, we were not only able to achieve greater technology agility but also drive business agility and focus on building mobile Internet and managing data workloads. Thanks to Red Hat for contributing in our digital journey.”

Chris Wang, executive vice president, Information Management Office, Cathay United Bank

“Cathay United Bank has been focusing on its digital transformation journey to move from a product-centric vertical architecture to a customer-centric horizontal architecture since 2015.  The major shift in this enterprise architecture change is achieved technically by implementing the design of the Enterprise Architecture Integration (EAI), consists of Red Hat OpenShift, a micro-service based docker container PaaS solution, and Red Hat FUSE as a foundation of our PaaS.  It enables us greater capabilities in providing a more flexible, highly efficient and faster time-to-market service to support in business growth, and to help survive in the FinTech competition.”

Koji Yokota, director and senior managing executive officer, Fukuoka Financial Group, Inc.

“In order to accelerate our digital transformation journey and move to the cloud, we adopted Red Hat solutions and enrolled in the Red Hat Open Innovation Labs program. By gaining a better understanding of agile development methodologies and the DevOps culture, we’ve been able to innovate faster, which we believe is crucial to being more competitive in the market.”

Additional Resources

[1] Red Hat client data and Fortune Global 500 list, September 2018

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