Portuguese bank novobanco has adopted Red Hat’s fully managed and supported application platform, Azure Red Hat OpenShift, to expedite its digital-first banking transformation.
With the new platform, novobanco expects to become a digital-first bank by shortening time-to-market for new products and services, enhancing developer productivity, and driving quicker expansion into new markets.
Azure Red Hat OpenShift will enable the Portuguese bank to consistently expand development and operations across its cloud and on-premises environments, said Red Hat.
With a combination of automation and management of the deployment stack, proactive monitoring, and preventative remediation by Red Hat and Microsoft support employees, the platform is said to enable banks to deliver customer services with higher stability and less downtime.
In collaboration with Red Hat Consulting, novobanco launched a DevOps pipeline to streamline and automate the development process. The bank then deployed its core customer-facing applications as microservices to the managed OpenShift environment.
According to Red Hat, its integrated security and identity management capabilities have helped the bank to develop digital identities, connect existing user directories, and utilise enhanced access control for microservices operating in cloud environments.
Red Hat Spain and Portugal country manager Julia Bernal said: “We are seeing how Azure Red Hat OpenShift is helping novobanco to quickly move from idea to production, and so bring new services and offers to their customers.
“With retail and business customers demanding more and more from their banks, this ability to accelerate go-to-market times helps novobanco to create a more competitive opportunity.”
With the help of Red Hat OpenShift, novobanco has introduced new services such as a mobile app that allows users keep better track of their investments and spending patterns.
The bank is now offering a complete digital process for credit and new account applications and enable faster and more secure login processes for end-users as well as employees.
Currently, Red Hat is assisting novobanco in developing phase two of its hybrid cloud vision, which will include a cloud-first strategy for all new applications.
Novobanco chief information officer Manuel Domingues said: “We needed to change the way we developed to help us become more competitive, and that meant changing our technology, our processes, our organisation and our culture to increase efficiency and productivity.
“Our collaboration with Red Hat and adoption of Azure Red Hat OpenShift has provided a firm foundation for growth. Our development teams can now work with more independence, be more productive, and help us as a business bring innovation to customers faster.”