Banco Angolano de Investimentos (BAI), a first-rate full-service bank in Angola that serves more than 1,5 million corporate clients, began a journey to modernize its technological infrastructure, which aims to meet the increasingly digital demands of its growing customer base.
According to Paulo Domingos, BAI's information systems architect, there were three main problems facing the bank. I was trying to solve the banking challenges of Angola's informal sector and I was fighting nimble startups.
Furthermore, although BAI was ahead of the curve in deploying a VMware virtual environment over a decade ago, the aging hardware has finally caught up with its ability to perform effective disaster recovery.
Also, failing over to a secondary site would result in long downtime. This was hampering the team's ability to modernize their systems, become self-sufficient and embrace the digital transformation. Domingos said that BAI also faces energy and communication challenges in the country.
“Our challenges are not just about infrastructure or legacy technology. We want to continue as a world-class bank, so we need a foundation that can support the pace of innovation we've established and remove our reliance on third-party resources like energy and communications.”
Ultimately, the bank realized that if it wanted to continue as a world-class bank, it needed a foundation that could support the pace of innovation it had established and remove its reliance on third-party resources, Domingos said.
To be more agile as a bank, the IT team has had to shift from responding to everyday emergencies to a value-based role where information technology has become an active business enabler that can predict the future and support the business. delivering industry-relevant solutions and applications to different teams across the bank.
“In short, delivering applications that add value to the customer, and for that, we need a robust technology backend.” “And we also needed to get our people right, our skills and all the pieces of the puzzle,” said Domingos.
Domingos advances that, a function based on value, where we can predict the future and support the business, provide solutions and applications relevant to the sector for different teams”. Deep analysis of our environment, the bank realized that it wanted its team to be more agile in order to take advantage of the benefits of a software defined data center (SDDC).
The designed BAI system allows it to benefit from the abstraction capabilities of an SDDC that supports elasticity, flexibility, reliability, stability and automation.
Wanting a solution for BAI that met the bank's specific needs, the company chose VMware NSX Data Center and VMware vRealize to help it take a step forward towards cloud and digital centricity.
After investing in a thorough internal assessment of the quality of its systems – BAI's IT team built an infrastructure strategy to respond to the bank's immediate and future business needs, regain control of its technology budget processes and enable the construction of innovative digital banking solutions.
“The solution will work now and in the future and will help us envision how we can use technology to differentiate our value proposition and develop innovative products and services. Yes, this will be through the development of tailor-made applications and yes, it will be in the cloud”, says Domingos.
“The initial design will not need to be changed, it can be added as needed. We won't see the financial benefits for the first year, nor for the second, but in the third year the benefits in terms of cost reduction are clear”, concludes Domingos.
