Leading Saudi bank and Red Hat accelerate digital banking innovation
Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, announced Monday that Arab National Bank (ANB), a leading banking institution in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), is speeding its transformation in key areas.
Those areas include digital banking, open finance and customer engagement with agile delivery and modern apps built on a foundation of open hybrid cloud technologies, including Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
The companies’ open hybrid cloud platforms work across IT environments from on-premises data centres to multi-cloud environments. As such, ANB has Red Hat OpenShift deployed on its private cloud infrastructure with several microservices-based applications running in production and the ability to expand and scale across one or more public clouds as its needs evolve.
In addition, Red Hat OpenShift offers built-in container isolation features and other security capabilities like runtime observability, authentication, authorization, and encryption. ANB is also using Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform to host next-generation Java and Jakarta EE applications across its hybrid environment.
Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, provides a common layer abstracted from underlying infrastructure to give both developers and operations teams consistency in how applications are packaged, deployed and managed.
ANB says it can deliver differentiated and connected customer experiences faster and with greater scalability based on open finance standards, by building cloud-native applications and banking-as-a-service (BaaS) offerings using APIs and a microservices integration layer on its Red Hat-based platform.
Aiedh M. Al-Zahrani, chief operating officer at ANB said that “Embracing digital banking as part of a more open, integrated ecosystem is a fundamental mindset shift with regard to business model development. At ANB, we are proud of the advancements we have made in the Saudi market as one of the first banks to adopt private cloud containers and DevOps delivery models for open APIs. Red Hat is helping us boost our capabilities to develop and scale open finance and BaaS innovation more quickly and securely to get ahead of customer demand.”
On his part, Ali Al Shami, country manager, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain at Red Hat added: “Financial services firms are looking to open hybrid cloud solutions to help them more easily address customer expectations for convenience, speed and engagement. At the same time, opening up digital banking products and services with open APIs presents an opportunity for deeper, more creative ecosystem collaboration and a way to drive internal business synergies and efficiencies.”
We are excited to help power ANB’s open finance proposition, he noted, with open source cloud-native technology.