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Several financial institutions across the Asia Pacific have adopted Red Hat hybrid cloud architectures and practices, in a concerted effort to become more agile while reducing costs and more effectively managing risks.
The regional banks that have adopted the open source vendor’s technology include Malaysia’s AmBank Group, Indonesia’s PT Bank Tabungan Pensiunan Nasional Tbk, Indonesia’s Bank BRI, China’s China Merchants Bank, Taiwan’s Cathay United Bank, and Japan’s Fukuoka Financial Group.
“The changes that are reshaping the financial services industry are providing financial institutions in APAC with opportunities to transform themselves to find new sources of competitive advantage,” said Benjamin Henshall, director of sales, financial services of APAC at Red Hat.
"Red Hat’s open source solutions can offer an innovative, reliable foundation that can help financial institutions scale more dynamically, withstand failures, and adapt more quickly.
"This can help financial institutions focus on innovation and customer engagement while running their IT platforms at a lower cost of service."
According to IDC findings, traditional financial services institutions have a growing appetite for collaborating with fintechs or investing in them to build innovation competencies.
“Open source is increasingly seen as a gateway to quick innovation,” said Michael Araneta, associate vice president at IDC. "Banks are leveraging open source to bring to market new business models, product features, and product propositions - and allowing that these are done fast and reliably.
"Many of these new offerings require new application functionalities, new features or fixes that are deployed and redeployed quickly and continuously.
"The ability to innovate fast, and change just as quickly will be a key indicator for success for banks in the future."
These financial institutions primarily use Red Hat’s open source technology as a means to automate and optimise IT processes; simplify front, middle and back office process; facilitate application and data integration; as well as modernise application development for better customer experience.
"As part of our digital journey, it was critical for us to transform and innovate our services,” said Datuk Iswaraan Suppiah, group chief operations officer at AmBank Group.
"By adopting Red Hat solutions, we were able to build up our digital capabilities with a more agile and scalable application delivery.
"This further helped us develop new applications and services to expand our market reach. We have upgraded our digital banking experience and services for our valued customers, making their banking experience with us more convenient and seamless."
With the rising complexity of transactions and the growing volumes of data and increased regulation, as well as the growing number of nimble fintech organisations emerging across the region, financial institutions need to adopt a more agile mindset as well as the technology to back it up to better address consumer and regulatory needs for digital banking.
This can call for an IT architecture and modern application development and delivery practices that can deliver greater speed, stronger security, and greater flexibility while also enhancing the way organisations work across the business, IT and their partners.
“Our customers value speed, efficiency and accessibility and so it was important for us to move from a legacy infrastructure to the cloud,” said Indra Utoyo, managing director of IT at BRI. "Using Red Hat solutions, we were able to deploy an enterprise cloud infrastructure which has made us more agile and cost-efficient.
"This has enabled us to offer new digital services to our customers and help sharpen our competitive edge."
