Banking reimagined with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

One of the big challenges to the banking sector is coming from outside, as start-ups offer innovative services. As an incumbent how do you defend your competitive position? Do you innovate with financial products? Do you revamp your IT?

Let’s take a look at one of the banks to see how it responded to the competitive challenges.

OTP Bank Romania S.A. operates a large network of branches and online services in the heavily-regulated financial services industry. The bank faces an ongoing challenge to reduce costs and improve customer service. This has been especially true in recent years, as new regulations have allowed many start-up competitors to enter the market.

Simplify IT

OTP Bank Romania S.A.’s response to these challenges has been to centralize its IT systems.

Centralization helped them achieve a significant result – IT got simplified to a large extent.  As a result of which, they are able to provide financial services much more easily. Overall the enablement of services has become smoother.

As part of simplification they also wanted to have a homogeneous IT landscape that can support a multitude of business critical applications. The bank needs to run a variety of business critical applications such as internet banking, credit and debit card processing, credit approvals, and treasury operations. Having a homogeneous IT landscape would allow them to have better operations and easier compliance. They would be able to run a vast number of applications on same platform and consequently reduce the maintenance costs.

Role of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

From an IT perspective, there are two key priorities for the banking sector: security and reliability.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server delivers both of those qualities for OTP Bank Romania, and so it helps ensure a consistent, dependable service for their customers.

The bank currently runs majority of its core banking applications on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. The standardization of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server helped guarantee consistency for the bank by providing a homogeneous environment for its IT landscape.

The bank is seeing increased usage of its online banking platforms, and the transactions carried out there depend on the stability of the SUSE platform.

“More and more, online banking is becoming simply banking, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server provides a stable platform for us to meet consumer demand, as well as compete with our newer competitors in the online space.”

Bodan Stefan, Executive Director, OTP Bank Romania

Position for future growth

OTP Bank Romania S.A. has been a user of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for 12+ years. Over these years SUSE Linux Enterprise Server has been the bedrock of its IT infrastructure. Looking ahead, the bank likes the fact that SUSE Linux Enterprise Server integrates well with the other technologies used at the bank. That integration, combined with SUSE’s future strategy around products like SUSE OpenStack Cloud and SUSE Enterprise Storage, gives the bank confidence that their investment in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server will continue to pay off well into the future.

For further details about the success story of OTP Bank Romania and to learn more about SUSE technologies here are a few links:

• OTP Bank Romania S.A – Success Story
• The Rise of Multimodal IT and What It Means To You
• Multimodal Operating System – Designed for IT Transformation
• SUSE Introduces Multimodal OS to Bridge Traditional and Software-defined Infrastructure
• What’s new with SUSE Linux Enterprise High Performance Computing 15
• What’s new with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications 15
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15

Stay tuned @RajMeel7