Pibank Launches on Red Hat OpenShift to Digitalize the Customer Experience

Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud platform helped to speed time-to-market by 2x, halve operational costs and free up the Pibank business to focus on innovation

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, announced that Pibank, part of Grupo Pichincha, has launched as a digital banking brand in Spain powered by Red Hat OpenShift.

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Grupo Pichincha identified an opportunity in the Spanish market to meet the needs of customers that expect a paperfree and easy way to  bank, and set out a plan to deliver a digital offering by 2020, called Pibank. Pibank looked for a cloud-native development platform that would enable it to rapidly create, release and adapt services in response to user and competitive demand, and changing regulatory climate. It also sought the flexibility to scale across a hybrid environment that could include private and multiple public clouds.

Pibank was brought to life using the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform, Red Hat OpenShift, on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in combination with Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage. VASS, a leading digital solutions provider and Red Hat Premier Business Partner, helped Grupo Pichincha with development, implementation, and project management. The project went from planning and design to production on Red Hat OpenShift within four months, with Pibank first launching a checking account to the public. It has since expanded further, releasing new services including credit cards, mortgages and deposits, all built following cloud-native architectures.

Pibank’s services are designed to be initiated, fulfilled and managed on personal devices via the Internet or mobile app, to offer an on-the-go banking experience. The convenience of processes that are digitalized end to end is paired with the option to meet with personnel in paperless branches in five Spanish cities. With Red Hat OpenShift automating the provisioning, management and scaling of applications, customer service staff can better focus on person-to-person consultation rather than back-end administration, and Pibank’s developers are freed up to write more innovative code that can bring greater business value.

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With Red Hat OpenShift, Pibank has calculated that it is able to roll out updates and new services twice as fast and at half the operating cost in comparison to if it had not made use of an enterprise open source container platform. Having met its launch goals, the Pibank team is looking at how it can integrate emerging technologies like advanced biometrics to further enhance the customer experience. Currently, Pibank is running on a private cloud and Red Hat OpenShift provides it with the ability to expand to a hybrid cloud in the future.

Julia Bernal, country manager, Spain and Portugal, Red Hat
“The evolution of technology and consumer expectations is opening up new opportunities in the financial sector, and Pibank is a shining example of how a more traditional business can redefine its model and rapidly deliver digital experiences to target new audiences. Pibank has been focused on driving maximum business value using Red Hat OpenShift and has shown it can innovate at speed and with the flexibility to adapt to a changing market.”

Vicent Escorihuela, Director of IT Infrastructure & Core Banking, Pibank
“In creating Pibank, we set two clear challenges. We wanted to offer end-to-end digital banking that made people’s lives easier, and we wanted to get closer to our customers both online and in person. We chose to rely on Red Hat technologies to harness the latest in open source community innovation, in balance with a rich feature set and the security features, support and performance we needed to meet our timelines and our customers’ expectations. We pride ourselves on breaking the mold for customer experience in-branch: we do not have ATMs, cash, or paper, enabling staff to dedicate their full attention to the customer, and this is supported by smooth-running, powerful technology from Red Hat.”

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