TienPhong Bank has been using IBM's cloud solutions since 2011 for financial and banking services, especially in its core banking upgrade, mobile applications, e-banking services and other testing operations.

As a result of using IBM cloud capabilities to deliver improved service to its clients TienPhong Bank saw a 50 percent increase in the number of customers in less than one year. The bank is continuing to improve and streamline operations to further drive this growth.

Founded in 2008, TienPhong Bank currently has 33 branches and plans to work towards an increase of 30% in their profits in the next 5 years and become a leading financial institution in the region. TienPhong Bank started on a cloud journey in early 2011 by shifting from its traditional IT systems to a cloud computing environment to meet its growth objectives. With the aim of more standardization, increased operational expenditure (OPEX) savings, and a faster time to the market, the bank set up a private cloud environment.

Banks are increasingly using cloud computing, especially private cloud, for reducing the time to market of new services and enhance profitability. It helps them reduce the cost of business and technology operations. Cloud also provides the visibility, control and automation they need to support the technology foundation that enables business transformation and success.

Within the last three years of implementation, the cloud technology built on open standards has enabled TienPhong Bank to launch nine new transaction centers across the country and a slew of e-banking services, such as electric payment and online gold trading services. Another new service is the eCounter, a smart remote identification system, enabling TienPhong Bank's staff to recognize their clients as soon as they step into the bank, ensuring better and faster personal service.

"As a young bank, driving fast growth and offering superior customer services are critical for TienPhnog Bank's success. With no legacy technology, we realized that cloud computing perfectly suits our requirements of building an agile and robust infrastructure that can be easily scaled as needed. The move to cloud environments built by IBM has turned out to be a key decision behind the present and future growth of the bank and is enabling us to transform our services for our clients overall," said Mr. Bui Quang Cuong, Head of IT at TienPhong Bank.

Mr. Bui also added, "Thanks to the positive outcomes of the new IBM cloud computing solutions in our organization, TienPhong Bank has decided to continue to upgrade the IT systems at our back-up data center, to mirror what we currently have at our primary data center, leveraging similar technology from IBM."

This cloud environment has enabled TienPhong Bank to have an improved and faster process of market segmentation, allowing it to develop products and services that are more relevant to each customer group's needs. The bank now provides improved self-service features and request-driven user experience, with capabilities which dramatically helped decrease the high costs of administration. In addition, TienPhong Bank also successfully integrated all of its customer data across the country, to provide and ensure consistent and real-time information, as well as a complete and consistent view of customer information.

"IBM has been a leader in building cloud environments, especially for industries like banking and financial services, which demand high security and regulatory requirements. As a pioneering project in Vietnam's banking industry, we are excited to see TienPhong Bank benefitting from the IBM cloud solutions built on open standards. We continue to work with the bank in their endeavor towards higher growth, continued transformation and wider market expansion," said Mr. Le Tran Nguyen, Director and Chief Solution Architect, Cloud Computing Solution Center, IBM Vietnam.

In a continuation of this cloud computing project, TienPhong Bank recently opted for additional solutions from IBM's Cloud and Smarter Infrastructure - Power System 750 servers, IBM Flex Systems, IBM Storwize V7000 storage, and IBM Tivoli backup management software.

The smarter computing solution comprising IBM Flex System nodes running a combination of the Red Hat Linux Enterprise and IBM AIX operating systems as well as IBM virtualization technologies will enable the bank to accelerate its service-management process by rapidly deploying new cloud-based services and applications to accommodate the changing demands of its clients. It will help TienPhong Bank further improve its storage and virtualization capabilities, simplify administration with advanced user interfaces, and scale accordingly when the bank grows further.