news Bendigo and Adelaide Bank has adopted IBM cloud to boost development of new banking products and services for its 1.6 million customers.
In a statement issued by IBM, the bank said it has moved to Bluemix, IBM’s cloud development platform, to build, test and deploy “timely and cost effective” solutions that are focused on the customers’ needs.
“The way our customers engage with us and the service they need is changing, and fast,” said Stella Thredgold, the bank’s Executive for Business Enablement. “IBM Cloud gives us the agility and security needed to better deliver innovative customer solutions across multiple platforms.”
Thredgold further said the move means the bank can operate with a “startup mindset”, having the ability to take products to market more quickly.
“[T]his will ultimately deliver the best outcome to our customers,” she said.
IBM cloud allows the bank to more efficiently run a variety of projects in parallel at different stages of development. This brings the benefit that delivery teams no longer need to manage or be restrained by environment provisioning or limited resources, the bank said.
The IBM cloud environment has already been employed by the bank when developing and deploying its Redy app. This product offers customers a “secure, fast and easy-to-use” mobile payment method via QR code, allowing users to offer credits to community groups.
IBM Bluemix has allowed Bendigo and Adelaide to “maximise capacity and capability to focus on developing new customer facing products and solutions”, it said.
Andrew Kupetz, IBM Cloud CTO, Australia and New Zealand, commented that Bluemix offers a “unique proposition” to the banking industry, which is increasingly facing disruption from newcomers.
“Traditional banks that make the move to cloud will have the agility, speed and innovation to win out against these new disruptors and lead the industry,” Kupetz said.
“IBM Cloud delivers customers like Bendigo and Adelaide Bank the most comprehensive, enterprise-grade hybrid cloud environment, where they can take advantage of the inherent benefits of largest public deployment of Cloud Foundry in the world: security and the ability to connect with an existing IT system,” he concluded.
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