To gain the scalability and agility demanded by its customers, the Bank has united digital operations on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to accelerate application development and deliver services to customers more quickly.

As a challenger to the UK’s big five banks, the combination of CYBG with Virgin Money seeks to disrupt the status quo in banking. The full-service Bank focuses on UK consumers and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and is seeking to take advantage of opportunities to expand its market share as payment, mortgage, and lending markets evolve. To achieve this goal, the Bank is launching new, innovative digital services more quickly than before.

As part of its digital transformation strategy, CYBG created a digital platform, called iB, in 2016 to challenge traditional banking services by transforming the way customers manage their money. The Bank invested in a common platform to unify its services, using a blend of microservices-based and traditional platform technologies.

To continue its digital growth, the Bank wanted to establish standardised services and features across its brands — while also gaining the flexibility to let each brand create custom services to respond to unique customer needs. In addition, it sought to speed delivery with an open, common approach to creating, managing and delivering services. To gain the desired agility for all of its brands, CYBG looked to Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, a comprehensive, leading enterprise Kubernetes platform based on the trusted backbone of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat OpenShift is designed to provide a single foundation for building, deploying and scaling applications faster across a hybrid cloud infrastructure. This gives the Bank the flexibility to meet its current on-premise requirements, as well as the opportunity to scale into the cloud in the future as its needs evolve.

With Red Hat, CYBG can take advantage of open source community innovation combined with leading support, greater reliability and strong security capabilities. A key benefit of moving to Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform has been greater capability to scale, at speed. The platform for the B digital bank was originally handling 40,000 customer logins per day, whereas it has now been unified with digital operations for CYBG and scaled to support more than 1,000,000 digital banking customer logins per day, all within 12 months. Developer teams can be more productive and can now gain access to an OpenShift environment within five minutes, compared to the three weeks it often took with the previous environment. OpenShift provides greater automation and simplified orchestration of IT operations tasks, helping free up developers to focus on innovating and serving the business, spending less time on process and maintenance. They can now more quickly move their projects across environments and take new ideas into production.

CYBG’s digital banking operations now run on its Operational Platform which has Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform at its core. The Bank aims to continue to improve customer experiences by launching new services faster and meeting unique service demands. It wants to better understand the individual customer and be able to address their needs as they happen. To support this, the Bank reports that it is currently planning to migrate 80 percent of its systems to the Operational Platform by 2020.

Martin Lentle, UKI country manager, Red Hat
“CYBG has embraced microservices, Linux containers and Kubernetes to boost its agility. Now that it has unified its digital banking systems, based on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, it is better positioned to focus on driving new value for the business. We’re excited to collaborate with the CYBG team on their journey to modernise and digitise the Bank, and to bring more value and an enhanced digital experience to customers.”

Denis Blackwood, head of IT Services, at CYBG
“In the current climate, a Bank needs to differentiate itself and this can come from not only delivering a more consistent, omnichannel service, but finding where to add value. We want to establish our position as a leading digital bank and grow our retail customer base through digital services. With Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, we’re already starting to see gains in the productivity of IT and application development - and we expect this will help us make savings in time and effort for the bank, as well as giving us greater firepower to innovate.”