Red Hat today announced that Arab National Bank (ANB), a leading banking institution in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, is speeding its transformation in key areas including digital banking, open finance and customer engagement through the use of apps built on a foundation of open hybrid cloud technologies, including Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Digital transformation
Digital transformation is part of ANB’s forward-looking strategy to compete in Saudi Arabia’s banking industry and enrich customer experiences with technologies and platforms based on artificial intelligence. As part of its strategy, ANB is looking to more securely and efficiently create, manage and expand connections with ecosystem partners. By building open hybrid cloud-native applications and Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) offerings using APIs and a microservices integration layer on its Red Hat-based platform, ANB can deliver these differentiated and connected customer experiences faster and with greater scalability based on open finance standards.
Ali Al Shami, country manager, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, Red Hat, said, “Financial services firms are looking to open hybrid cloud solutions to help them more easily address customer expectations for convenience, speed and engagement. At the same time, opening up digital banking products and services with open APIs presents an opportunity for deeper, more creative ecosystem collaboration and a way to drive internal business synergies and efficiencies. We are excited to help power ANB’s open finance proposition with open source, cloud-native technology.”
Varied environments
Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud platforms work across IT environments from on-premises datacenters to multicloud environments, creating a consistent foundation for both existing and cloud-native applications. ANB currently has Red Hat OpenShift deployed on its private cloud infrastructure with several microservices-based applications running in production and the ability to expand and scale across one or more public clouds as its needs evolve.
As security is paramount when embracing open hybrid cloud-native apps, Red Hat OpenShift offers built-in container isolation features and other security capabilities like runtime observability, authentication, authorization, and encryption. Using Red Hat Enterprise Linux across its environment enables ANB to benefit from the security capabilities and consistency the Linux platform is known for. ANB is also using the Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, to host next-generation Java and Jakarta EE applications across its open hybrid cloud environment.
Aiedh M. Al-Zahrani, chief operating officer, ANB, said, “Embracing digital banking as part of a more open, integrated ecosystem is a fundamental mindset shift with regard to business model development. At ANB, we are proud of the advancements we have made in the Saudi market as one of the first banks to adopt private cloud containers and DevOps delivery models for open APIs. Red Hat is helping us boost our capabilities to develop and scale open finance and BaaS innovation more quickly and securely to get ahead of customer demand.”
Consistency is key
Red Hat OpenShift, an enterprise Kubernetes platform, provides a common layer abstracted from the underlying infrastructure to give both developers and operations teams consistency in how applications are packaged, deployed and managed. With OpenShift’s full-stack automated operations, consistent experiences across every environment and self-service provisioning for developers, ANB anticipates its teams will be able to use agile development methods such as continuous deployment and DevOps to work together more efficiently to move ideas from development to production.
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