Henry R. Aguda (UnionBank)
Union Bank of the Philippines (UnionBank) has deployed VMware Cloud on AWS as part of the ongoing cloud-only IT transformation that has seen it shift much of its infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS).
In May, the company said it hoped to complete its IT infrastructure shift from an on-premises environment to AWS by 2022, with the organisation set to run hundreds of mission-critical applications on the cloud giant’s infrastructure.
The migration is intended to accelerate the bank’s digital transformation efforts, improve customers’ digital banking experiences and strengthen financial inclusion in the Philippines by bringing financial services to remote parts of the country.
As part of the IT overhaul, the bank had planned to migrate over 900 virtual machines to VMware Cloud on AWS. Now, it appears that part of the migration has been successfully completed.
It is hoped the VMware Cloud on AWS deployment will provide UnionBank with the flexibility and agility for exponential growth and faster response times to consumer needs, enabling the Bank to drive greater financial inclusion in the Philippines.
“Despite the reduced physical interactions last year, we managed to attract 24 million new accounts with a large portion coming from digital account opening,” said UnionBank’s senior executive vice president and chief technology, operations and transformation officer Henry R. Aguda.
“This signals the pivotal shift that [the] Philippines is making towards digital banking, and as the leading bank in the country, we are on a constant pursuit of innovative banking services to deliver digital experiences that will best serve our customers’ needs.
“As such, we are pleased to work with VMware to supercharge our innovations and build a stronger, resilient ecosystem and empower Filipino businesses with the right tools and platforms to accelerate business growth as we continue to shape the digital future of banking in Philippines,” he added.
It is thought that the use of VMware Cloud on AWS will be able to provide UnionBank with greater flexibility in its multi-cloud strategy, while enabling the bank to improve agility, scalability, time to market and gain faster recovery from deployment failures.
“As UnionBank continues to focus on pushing the envelope on digital transformation, VMware is excited to be part of their transformation journey,” said Walter So, VMware Philippines country manager.
“Through VMware Cloud on AWS, we are committed to building a strong digital foundation for UnionBank to accelerate modern applications and empower the bank with an end-to-end holistic approach from designing applications and integrating our solutions with [its] operations to respond, adapt and accelerate growth, agility and business innovations in today’s new digital paradigm,” he added.
If all goes to plan, when UnionBank completes its migration in 2022 it will run almost 400 mission-critical applications on AWS, including Finacle Core Banking and SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud.
