Three Asian financial services firms were lauded for their successful enterprise open source digital transformation (DX) journeys: How did they do it?
Across the Asia Pacific region (APAC), many companies have in this tumultuous year seen their digitalization timelines compressed, to hopefully emerge leaner, more agile and more efficient in order to survive.
One aspect of digitalization can involve enterprise-level open source software (OSS), which offers some compelling benefits over traditional solutions.
At this year’s Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards, the limelight shone on companies in the region that are taking their transformation plans forward with this company’s enterprise open source solutions.
China’s OSS open banking experience
China CITIC Bank International Limited (CNCBI) is a Hong Kong-based full-service commercial bank. It provides a broad spectrum of financial services spanning wealth management, personal banking, wholesale banking, as well as global markets and treasury solutions.
To gain the ability to adapt to changing business and consumer demands in a timely and agile manner, the bank took on a phased approach to digital transformation (DX). It chose OSS as the underlying technology, and in the first DX phase revamped its monolithic architecture using solutions from Red Hat. Using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to automate the management of its IT infrastructure, the bank minimized human errors and saw a 60% improvement in its operational efficiency.
In the second phase, the bank deployed Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform as the foundation of its hybrid cloud strategy and to modernize its legacy banking applications.
Collectively, the OSS solutions enabled the bank to embrace DevOps and agile application development, which helped to halve its application development time. CNCBI can now update its mobile banking and investment application with new features within days, compared to three months previously.
With increased speed to market, the bank can henceforth continually enhance its services and deliver even more effective customer experience.
“Working with Red Hat has brought us a step closer to achieving our vision of becoming the best integrated financial services institution. By transforming our IT infrastructure with OSS, our mission-critical applications can address customer needs while complying with regulations. We’re also able to focus more on value creation for our customers, as the new infrastructure provides a reliable yet flexible foundation that supports innovation and new industry trends such as open banking.”
— Ji Jinxiang, Chief Information Officer, China CITIC Bank International Limited
Banking on OSS in Indonesia
CIMB Niaga is Indonesia’s second largest privately-owned bank in terms of assets, which is majority-owned by CIMB Group. It offers consumer banking, SME, commercial and corporate banking, treasury and payment services through its branches nationwide and digital banking platforms.
In the country’s highly-competitive consumer banking market, CIMB Niaga’s strategy to thrive is to ensure that its people, process and technology are aligned to the needs of the business.
This called for the bank to build consumer-facing applications in-house instead of relying on third-party applications. Choosing the OSS route, it engaged Red Hat Open Innovation Labs to learn best practices for agile methodology and DevOps, as well as seek help from the vendor to build an agile platform.
The Red Hat team subsequently enabled the bank to develop and deploy applications more rapidly in an automated and more secure manner. As a result, the bank can now respond to dynamic market demands in a more cost-efficient and faster manner.
“Red Hat has helped enhance and future-proof our ability to innovate. Through Red Hat solutions and services, we’ve managed to foster an enterprise-wide DevOps culture and build an agile platform, complete with continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline. This empowers us to deliver new customer-facing applications or update them with new services more quickly, which has enabled us to maintain our consumer banking share of wallet despite increased competition from our peers and from fintech companies.”
— Yenny Siswanto, Head Of IT, Pt Bank CIMB Niaga Tbk
