Rural Servicios Informaticos (RSI), a Spanish banking IT services provider, and IBM announced a collaboration to modernise RSI’s core banking platform with hybrid cloud technologies and industry experience from IBM and Red Hat.
In a statement, IBM said the partnership intends to extend RSI’s ecosystem of partners while expanding its digital product and service offerings as it develops its business for a digital-first generation.
Caja Rural Group, one of Spain’s biggest banking companies with a network of over 46 cooperative banks and Rural Financial Entities, uses RSI for core banking services. The banking platform at RSI is in charge of serving 8 million end-user users and processing 5 billion transactions every year.
Under the agreement, IBM Consulting will collaborate closely with RSI to build its hybrid cloud strategy, which will assist the banking IT group’s digital transformation initiative known as “Cloud Office,” and support shifting core workloads to the cloud. A key aspect of RSI’s business plan is updating its platform into a hybrid cloud architecture so that digital channels and applications can run securely across any technology environment. This will assist enhance operational efficiency and encourage innovation while implementing higher levels of security and meeting industry regulatory compliance standards.
As legal and compliance requirements grow, customer demand for digital banking services rapidly expands. To remain competitive and improve customer experience, RSI is updating its technological infrastructure and applications. The bank will combine IBM Cloud for Financial Services with the resiliency of IBM® z16TM and Red Hat OpenShift, an industry-leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, to create a highly secure environment that will enable RSI to manage mission-critical data, services, and workflows for its clients across multiple platforms.
“IBM has become a key player in the development of RSI’s digital capabilities, due to its deep understanding of the financial sector and its insight into RSI resulting from many successful years of joint collaboration. Together we will combine our new technological infrastructures into an open hybrid cloud operating model that helps us advance deploying our technology evolution plan,” RSI CEO Carlos Cervero said.
According to IBM, RSI will adopt IBM Cloud for Financial Services and become a member of IBM’s Multi-Cloud Zone Region (MZR) in Spain to help ensure the platform meets the country’s Financial Services laws. The IBM Cloud for Financial Services includes built-in security and compliance controls to assist businesses in managing regulatory constraints that impede the IT landscape and application modernisation. The platform, supported by a growing community of more than 125 technology partners and FinTechs, is meant to accelerate financial institution changes while reducing third- and fourth-party risks along the supply chain.
Financial fraud is an industry concern that RSI and its clients are addressing front on. Because of its integrated on-chip AI accelerator, the new IBM z16TM is designed to enable RSI to analyse transactions in real time at scale, detecting and preventing financial crime more efficiently. The IBM z16 was developed with energy efficiency, allowing RSI to achieve higher performance while using less energy. The bank may experience a 25 per cent reduction in infrastructure energy use and a 25 per cent reduction in heat dispersion. This could minimise CO2 emissions and help them meet their Sustainability targets.
RSI will use Red Hat OpenShift to design, deploy, and execute cloud-native apps to provide a more uniform experience wherever it is deployed – in the cloud, on-premises, or at the edge. This will improve efficiency, flexibility, and time-to-market in creating, operating, and maintaining the company’s more than 176 essential business applications.
RSI and Red Hat have a long history of working together. RSI will run this project on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the world’s premier enterprise Linux platform. RSI’s existing automation strategy will strengthen this digital transformation initiative with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform throughout its infrastructure and operations. RSI has not only reduced delivery time but has also reduced error rate by utilising Ansible Automation Platform.
“With cyber risks and regulatory fines dominating headlines, IBM has led in the creation of an industry-specific secured cloud. The controls built into IBM’s cloud platform are informed by the industry and aim to help RSI and banking institutions across the world protect highly regulated workloads and address the requirements of regulators. We help our clients address third- and fourth-party risk, and execute transactions more efficiently,” said Hillery Hunter, General Manager, Cloud Industry Platforms & Solutions, CTO, IBM Cloud.
Red Hat’s country manager for Spain and Portugal Julia Bernal stated that Red Hat’s open-source technologies give RSI a solid platform for driving digital transformation of its banking solutions.
“We are pleased to further enable RSI’s core banking platform on Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud for Financial Services, building on our existing support through Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to streamline operations and accelerate innovation within the financial sector. We look forward to our continued collaboration with RSI and IBM Spain in delivering digital-first banking services in the region,” Bernal added.
, a Spanish banking IT services provider, and IBM announced a collaboration to modernise RSI's core banking platform with hybrid cloud technologies and industry experience from IBM and Red Hat.){kind=link}