IBM Extends Its Banking Tech Expertise Into Emerging Markets

By Darryl K. Taft

IBM has been aggressively selling its banking infrastructure in emerging economies, with key wins in Africa, South America and Asia, among other areas.

Vietnam has a labor force of more than 50 million people, yet roughly 80 percent of the population is currently unbanked. Saigon Hanoi Commercial Joint Stock Bank is using IBM Power Systems, Storage, and Tivoli software to streamline business processes across its IT infrastructure and enable broader client reach through new online and mobile banking services.

IBM technology has cut processing time for customer transactions in half at Keystone Bank in Nigeria, while increasing overall process performance by 90 percent and reducing operating costs by 60 percent. The technology consists of IBM Power Systems and Storage, AIX operating systems PowerVM virtualization technology and PowerHA disaster resiliency software.

With an estimated 240 million people, Indonesia is the world’s fourth-largest nation and one of the fastest-growing economies in Asia, prompting HSBC-owned Bank Ekonomi Raharja to upgrade the IT infrastructure for its core banking systems to streamline business processes and expand services to meet the demands of a rapidly growing customer base. Bank Ekonomi Raharja is using IBM technology consisting of Power servers and DS Series storage.

Known for its innovative mortgage and rural banking services, Ghana’s Fidelity Bank built a state-of-the-art data center to manage the tremendous growth it was experiencing, focusing on energy efficiency, business continuity, resiliency, security and disaster recovery. The data center, located at the bank’s headquarters in the Ghanaian capital of Accra, consists of IBM Power and System x servers, PowerHA disaster resiliency and PowerVM, and DS Series and Storwize storage.

Serving clients in more than 40 cities across the nation, the International Bank of Azerbaijan faces the challenge of managing rapidly growing data volumes. The bank chose an IBM Storwize storage offering over competing products to improve storage utilization, centralize and simplify management, and increase capacity through virtualization technologies.

Credit Unions System for Brazil (Sicoob) is the largest credit union system in Brazil, offering banking and credit services to more than 2.5 million people. A Linux-based Smarter Computing technology from IBM consisting of System z servers, DB2 database, InfoSphere DataStage and Cognos analytics software helped the institution reduce energy costs by $1.5 million annually, while growing in-branch transactions by 60 percent, Internet banking by 200 percent and mobile solutions by 600 percent.

The largest private bank in the Democratic Republic of Congo, RAWBANK needed to reach unbanked potential clients with innovative services such as text notification via mobile phone for all account debits and credits, and prepaid debit cards to allow small businesses and individuals to securely pay bills and procure goods without carrying around cash. The technologies from IBM to enable these services include Power and Blade Center servers, with Informix database and information management software.

In India, the banking industry is growing 23 percent annually, yet only 61 percent of the population has savings accounts, 19 percent has debit cards and 1 percent has credit cards. To tap this market opportunity and attract young, Internet-savvy customers, Dombivli Nagari Sahakari Bank was the first cooperative bank in the country to launch mobile banking services, supported by an IBM PureFlex System solution that integrates the bank’s hardware, cloud capabilities, network management and virtualization.

Argentina is a highly competitive environment for banks, and as one of the top three private banks in Argentina, Banco Galicia needed to develop and launch new banking and financial products faster to win new customers and increase its competitiveness. The bank chose an IBM System z platform and DS Series storage as the foundation for an SAP for Banking technology to provide speed, reliability and availability, and to integrate legacy applications, preserving existing investments in software and business processes.

Leading commercial financial institution China Everbright Bank has selected an IBM Smarter Computing offering to run its core credit card operations with daily and peak volumes exceeding 10 and 12 million transactions. To ensure availability at its 82 branches and more than 600 outlets in more than 60 cities across China, the bank is now building an architecture based on the IBM System z mainframe. To analyze huge quantities of business, market and customer data in near-real time, it chose to implement IBM Power Systems and IBM Cognos software, which help collect and integrate data from multiple sources.

Headquartered in Moscow, Alfa Bank is Russia’s largest private bank, with more than 5 million customers in seven countries. The bank chose IBM Power Systems running SAP human resources management software, allowing fast deployment, flexible workload distribution, security and scalability for applications, with minimal administration requirements.