Red Hat: Powering Nationwide's Digital Transformation
Open source solutions leader Red Hat has announced its collaboration with Nationwide Building Society to build and scale its new Business Integration Platform (BIP).
Leveraging Red Hat’s cloud solution, Nationwide can drive a 500% improvement in processing times and near-perfect service availability.
BIP is built on Red Hat OpenShift – an industry-leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes – which has enabled Nationwide to achieve an impressive 99.999% service availability while significantly accelerating the deployment of upgrades and new features.
The partnership comes at a crucial time for Nationwide, as it seeks to better support the increasing digital demands of its 16 million members.
Joanna Hodgson, UK Country Manager at Red Hat, emphasises the importance of this transformation: “For a customer-focused business adapting to digitalisation like Nationwide, the ability to move quickly whilst maintaining resilience and reliability is paramount.”
Nationwide: A digital transformation
At the heart of this digital overhaul is Nationwide's Speed Layer, a platform designed to gather and process real-time data, enabling swift responses to events as they occur.
Built using Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Speed Layer has demonstrated remarkable scalability and efficiency. Its success prompted Nationwide to expand its vision, leading to the creation of a more comprehensive BIP.
The BIP, developed in collaboration with Red Hat Consulting, leverages the power of open-source technologies such as Kafka for distributed event storage and stream processing, and MongoDB for database management.
This combination of technologies supports continuous service access even during outages, a critical feature for a financial institution of Nationwide's scale.
One of the most striking outcomes of this implementation is the platform's ability to reconcile over 100,000 data items per second, thanks to Kubernetes-based event-driven autoscaling (KEDA).
Improving user experience
This remarkable processing speed translates to faster data availability in Nationwide's Banking App, significantly enhancing the user experience for account management.
Grant Valentine, Head of Business Integration Platform at Nationwide, highlights the strategic importance of this development:
“Our Business Integration Platform powers many of our strategic initiatives, and running it on Red Hat OpenShift gives us hybrid cloud choice, robust performance and business agility so we can provide a faster and more convenient experience for our members.”
The results speak for themselves. Nationwide's BIP now processes an astounding 100 million calls daily, including 14 million external queries.
These improvements extend beyond mere statistics, translating into tangible benefits for Nationwide's customers, who can now enjoy more responsive and reliable digital banking services.
Red Hat OpenShift's self-service and automation capabilities have been instrumental in achieving these gains. The platform enables dynamic upgrades and launches of new capabilities, ensuring that members can continue to use services even during planned or unplanned outages.
This level of resilience is crucial in today's digital banking landscape, where customers expect 24/7 access to their financial services.
Security, a paramount concern in the financial sector, has been addressed through Red Hat OpenShift's built-in features. These include network and container isolation, as well as controlled access to application data, consistently applied across any underlying environment.
This robust security framework provides Nationwide with the confidence to innovate rapidly without compromising on data protection.
Grant Valentine concludes: “As digital requirements continue to evolve, whether the volume of payments, banking app users, regulation or system scalability, we have to be prepared for as yet unknown demands and channels.”
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