Kathy Gibson is at VMware Explore in Barcelona – With more than 1,5-million retail and corporate customers, Angola’s Banco Angolano de Investimentos (BAI) is determined to meet its current and future demands by modernising its technology infrastructure.
Selecting VMware NSX Data Center and VMware vRealize, Banco BAI has reclaimed its IT infrastructure and embraced a cloud-first and digital-centric approach, allowing it to better serve customers with modern banking applications.
Businesses across Angola face several challenges beyond their control such as instability in power and communications supply, a slow global supply chain, and long lead times to acquire and secure new technologies. This often leads to companies making their technology investments outlast their suggested lifespan, leading to a drop in customer service while hampering an IT team’s ability to innovate – which is what BAI set out to avoid.
“Our challenges don’t just relate to legacy infrastructure or technology. We want to continue as a world-class bank so we need a foundation that can support the pace of innovation that we have set ourselves and remove our reliance on third-party resources like power and communications,” says Paulo Domingos, information systems architect at BAI. “To be more agile, our IT team needs to shift from responding to daily emergencies to a value-based role where we can predict the future and support the business by delivering industry-relevant solutions and applications to different teams.”
Domingos explains that a top priority during the modernisation is to ensure compliance with central bank regulations. And being able to maintain data sovereignty is an important part of this.
The bank has a multi-cloud strategy. “We are able to choose the best cloud for the application,” Domingos says.
Running their systems on local clouds also helps them to save on connectivity costs.
But the main reason for the shift to VMware solutions was the agility they enable. “The legacy systems were costing a lot in money and resources, and we needed something more agile,” Domingos says. “We have a transformation department that came up with great ideas, but they were not executable.
“This is why we started investigating the cloud; to be more agile and be able to come up with business solutions.”
While BAI outpaced many of its African counterparts by deploying a VMware virtual environment more than 10 years ago, ageing hardware finally caught up with its ability to perform effective disaster recovery. Additionally, failover to a secondary site would result in a long downtime. This was hampering the team’s ability to modernise its systems, become self-sufficient, and embrace digital transformation.
After investing in a full internal quality assessment of its systems – the BAI IT team built an infrastructure strategy to answer the bank’s immediate and future business needs, take back control of its technology budgeting processes, and allow it to build innovative digital banking solutions.
The system BAI designed allows it to benefit from the abstraction capabilities of a software-defined data centre (SDDC) that supports elasticity, flexibility, reliability, stability and automation. Ultimately, it selected VMware NSX Data Center for its SDDC and a fully virtualised network for storage and servers while using VMware vRealize Suite to support the visibility and management of its SDDC.
Among the customer-facing solutions that BAI is currently offering is Internet Banking, but the main benefits so far have been in internal operations, Domingos says.
For instance, an internal data analysis solution is helping the bank to leverage 20 years of data to help with fraud and credit analysis.
The biggest impact so far has been felt by the development team, he adds. “They are now able to deliver faster and think of new ways to improve performance.”
The system is not only more stable than ever, but faults are easy to trace so fixes can be implemented quickly and with the least possible disruption. Predictive maintenance is also now possible, and audits can be conducted more quickly and accurately.
“We are more comfortable as a team and can focus our efforts on operational areas where we have the most impact, and implement clear goals supported by realistic KPIs while rolling out new systems and applications for the business. It’s a system that’s not just working for us today, but allows us to look to the future and visualise how we can use technology to differentiate our value proposition and develop innovative products and services.
“Yes, this will be through bespoke application development, and yes, it will be in the cloud,” says Domingos.
“BAI has been an incredible customer to work with. The IT team is forward-thinking and takes a bold approach. Nothing could stop them when they set out to embrace a digital-centric view of innovation. The result is that they now have an environment that supports the business and delivers on its desire to stay on top of the banking sector in Angola. And it’s one they have full control of – it’s truly remarkable,” says Lorna Hardie, regional director at VMware Sub-Saharan Africa.