The fully cloud-based platform enables the sharia bank to embrace virtualization, DevOps practices and automation to boost inclusion and CX.
In 2016, global Islamic finance assets reached US$2.2tn, and it has been projected to grow to US$3.78tn by 2022. In Indonesia, 51% of women and 46% of men (including the non-sharia population) are unbanked, despite the presence of approximately 60 million adults with mobile phones.
To meet their banking needs, the sharia business unit of Bank BJB, BJB Syariah, aims to cater to 80% of the nearly 50 million population across West Java, Jakarta and the Banten provinces.
However, the bank’s complex three-tier IT infrastructure has been difficult to scale. Its IT team has had to rely on time-consuming manual processes whenever new products needed to be developed, or existing products needed enhancements.
The bank was therefore compelled to search for a platform that could deliver both speed and agility to keep pace with rapid market changes. According to its IT division head, Dadang Rohandi: “At BJB Syariah, we aim to provide easy to access, prime quality Sharia services to customers. Importantly, building positive customer experiences and going to market fast with these products are crucial in our competitive market.”
Tapping the Cloud for financial inclusion
Last week, the bank announced that it has transformed its IT infrastructure to a fully cloud-based approach to gain speed and agility to keep pace with rapid market change. The new platform has enabled the bank to reduce delivery time of its microservices to customers from years to months—approximately 10 times faster than before. This includes the development of application software designed to support customers for their various needs such as a travel management system specifically for haji travel (when it is permitted).
Dadang added: “(The solution) has strengthened BJB Syariah’s business agility. We have cut down on IT complexity, lowered costs and enhanced performance overall. For instance, storage set-up that used to take weeks can now be done in a matter of minutes. This enables us to focus our efforts on creating better customer experiences instead of wasting resources on attending to maintenance and support issues.”
The new cloud-based platform from Nutanix includes a secure virtualization solution that streamlines operations; a Kubernetes management solution that simplifies operations and provisioning, as well as a lifecycle management solution that enables the bank to embrace DevOps practices and realize its goal of being one of the top five largest banks in Indonesia.
The digital transformation should reduce overall complexity and enable the bank to achieve an approximately 80% savings in the manhours required for its daily operations and maintenance. Overall IT operations costs should also be reduced by about 40%.
Nutanix’s Indonesia country manager, Fetra Syahbana, commented: “We are thrilled to support BJB Syariah in their strategic technology upgrade. It is important for the bank to modernize its IT and tap on the strength of cloud technology to fully cater to the needs of potentially millions of Indonesians who are fast demanding Islamic financial services.”
