Red Hat, announced that Arab National Bank (ANB), a leading banking institution in Saudi Arabia, is speeding its transformation in key areas including 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.
Digital transformation represents a major driver of ANB’s forward-looking strategy to compete in Saudi Arabia’s banking industry and enrich customer experiences with innovative technologies and platforms based on artificial intelligence. As part of its strategy to deliver this value to customers through flexible, innovative solutions, ANB is looking to more securely and efficiently create, manage and expand connections with ecosystem partners. 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, ANB can deliver these differentiated and connected customer experiences faster and with greater scalability based on open finance standards.
Aiedh M. Al-Zahrani, chief operating officer, ANB said “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.”
For ANB, security is paramount as they embrace cloud-native apps. Red Hat OpenShift offers built-in container isolation features and other security capabilities like runtime observability, authentication, authorization, and encryption, and using Red Hat Enterprise Linux across its environment enables ANB to benefit from the innovation, security capabilities and consistency the industry’s leading enterprise Linux platform is known for. 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. With OpenShift’s full-stack automated operations, consistent experience across all environments and self-service provisioning for developers, ANB anticipates its teams will be able to use agile development methods such as continuous deployment and DevOps to work together more efficiently to move ideas from development to production, contributing to a culture of innovation and speeding up time to market of new digital BaaS offerings for its customers.
Ali Al Shami, country manager, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, Red Hat said “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 with open source, cloud-native technology.”
