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Fransabank: Delighting customers with responsive and reliable in-branch, web and mobile banking
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
Applicable Industries
- Finance & Insurance
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Process Control & Optimization
- Predictive Maintenance
Services
- System Integration
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
The Challenge
Fransabank, one of Lebanon's largest banks, was experiencing rapid business growth that was putting a strain on its core systems. The bank was concerned about the performance of critical batch processing tasks at the start and end of each working day, and at the end of each month. These processing tasks, which ensure that all transactions are applied accurately and all accounts reconciled, are effectively a statutory requirement as well as enabling the bank to have an accurate view of its business performance. As the business grew rapidly and continuously, a main pillar of their IT strategy was to implement a robust, scalable and highly performing infrastructure capable of accompanying the business growth by processing a larger volume of data and transactions in less time. This would avoid any potential future service impact and secure the end-of-day processing before the branches opened at 8 am—without any concerns about the significant volume growth.
About The Customer
Fransabank is the oldest and among the largest of Lebanon’s banks, providing universal banking services through 124 branches. The bank has offices in nine other countries and reported net profits of USD179.8 million in financial year 2015 with total assets of USD20 billion. Fransabank has achieved exceptional growth in recent years. FY 2014 saw the successful acquisition of another major bank, contributing to year-on-year growth of 11.66 percent in total assets and 12.75 percent in shareholders’ equity. And from a peak year-on-year growth rate of 40.88 percent in 2011, net loans to customers have since settled to around 10 percent in year-on-year growth—still a highly impressive figure.
The Solution
Fransabank decided to deploy a completely new SAB AT core banking solution, with the back-office components running on the IBM i operating system and the front-office components running on IBM WebSphere Application Server on the IBM AIX operating system. Both components run side-by-side on IBM PowerVM on the same IBM Power 870 server in the production environment, and the landscape is duplicated in a second data center for protection against disaster. When it comes to ensuring exceptional end-to-end performance and high availability for critical systems, the storage layer is a vital consideration. Fransabank reviewed options from leading global vendors before selecting IBM DS8870 enterprise disk systems at the heart of a new virtualized storage landscape. Complementing the DS8870 systems in its primary and DR sites, Fransabank deployed IBM FlashSystem solutions to provide a “tier zero” of ultra-fast storage and IBM Storwize V7000 systems to provide flexible internally tiered storage for files and archived data. The entire landscape is virtualized using IBM Spectrum Virtualize, which enables Fransabank to manage sophisticated policy-based migration of data up and down the tiers as performance requirements change.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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