novobanco Accelerates Digital-First Banking Transformation with Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Technologies

Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that novobanco, a leading Portuguese bank, has adopted Azure Red Hat OpenShift, a fully managed and supported application platform, as the cornerstone of a new digital business initiative. The initiative aims to establish novobanco firmly as a digital-first bank by improving developer productivity, reducing time-to-market for new products and services and driving faster expansion into new markets.

With Azure Red Hat OpenShift, novobanco is able to better and more consistently scale development and operations across its cloud and on-premises environments. Azure Red Hat OpenShift enables the bank to deliver customer services with more stability and less downtime through a combination of automation and management of the deployment stack, and proactive monitoring and preventative remediation action by Red Hat and Microsoft support staff. This proved a key capability to improving financial management capabilities like account aggregation, which requires the ability to check balances, categorize transactions and track account movement across multiple banks.

Working with Red Hat Consulting, novobanco established a DevOps pipeline to automate and optimize development processes, and then deploying its core customer-facing applications as microservices to the managed OpenShift environment. The integrated security and identity management capabilities of Red Hat’s technologies helped novobanco to establish digital identities, helping connect existing user directories while taking advantage of improved access control for microservices running in cloud environments.

By building on an open hybrid cloud environment with Red Hat, novobanco has gained:

• Increased developer productivity through microservices, automation and reusable development patterns established by CI/CD;
• A consistent developer experience across IT environments, contributing to faster time-to-market for new products and services;
• Improved application portability, giving the bank greater flexibility to meet changing needs due to regulatory or latency demands;
• Reduced operational overhead by enabling developers to focus on building and scaling applications that add more business value, without having to also deal with underlying infrastructure requirements;
• A more sophisticated and personalized customer experience.

Using Red Hat OpenShift, novobanco has launched new services including a mobile app that enables customers to better track their investments and spending habits; a 100% digital process for credit and new account applications; and faster and more secure login processes for end-users and employees.

Red Hat is now helping novobanco scope out phase two of its hybrid cloud vision, including a cloud-first approach for all new applications, supported through ongoing collaboration with Red Hat to sharpen the skills, processes and culture of its teams. The only applications to remain on-premises are those with specific regulatory requirements, latency-sensitive applications or applications that have not yet been optimized for microservices or the cloud. This is part of a continuous improvement effort across IT and business functions to help the bank activate core business capabilities as digital services.

Supporting Quotes

Julia Bernal, country manager Spain and Portugal, Red Hat

“We are seeing how Azure Red Hat OpenShift is helping novobanco to quickly move from idea to production, and so bring new services and offers to their customers. With retail and business customers demanding more and more from their banks, this ability to accelerate go-to-market times helps novobanco to create a more competitive opportunity.”

Manuel Domingues, chief information officer, novobanco

“We needed to change the way we developed to help us become more competitive, and that meant changing our technology, our processes, our organization and our culture to increase efficiency and productivity. Our collaboration with Red Hat and adoption of Azure Red Hat OpenShift has provided a firm foundation for growth. Our development teams can now work with more independence, be more productive, and help us as a business bring innovation to customers faster.”