Founded in 1996, Advanced Bank of Asia (ABA Bank) is the largest private financial institution in Cambodia and provides a full range of consumer and business banking services. As the first bank in Cambodia to launch online and mobile banking services, ABA Bank has garnered global recognition for excellence and innovation. The bank has won numerous awards:it was named “Cambodia’s Bank of the Year” by The Banker Magazine and received the “Best Bank in Cambodia Award” from Euromoney and Global Finance. During 2024, ABA Bank secured its market-leading position by boosting total assets under management by 27%, growing customer deposits by 26% and increasing gross loans to $7.9 billion (“ABA Bank Wins Retail Bank of the Year - Cambodia,” Asian Banking & Finance, 2024).
At-a-Glance
Delivering fast, responsive and convenient mobile and digital banking solutions is key to success in Cambodia’s fiercely competitive banking sector. As the first to market with mobile and internet banking, ABA Bank holds a leading position in the country. Even so, the bank continues to look for new ways to enhance the customer experience. To enable the rapid creation of new solutions while securing customers’ money around the clock, ABA Bank has moved its core digital banking and back-office applications from a monolithic IT architecture to a containerized microservices environment managed with SUSE Rancher Prime and secured with SUSE Security — slashing the development time for new microservices in half.
Problem: planned downtime, spiking demand and slow releases
When it first launched its online and mobile banking services in 2015, ABA Bank built its applications on a traditional monolithic architecture. The tremendous popularity of digital banking meant that the organization needed to scale quickly to meet surging demand. However, the monolithic environment was difficult to scale and required a lot of work to manage. This ultimately took IT experts away from innovating new services and features and created a negative experience for customers.
“Retaining our status as Cambodia’s number one bank was our main focus, and protecting this title really kept our DevOps team on their toes,” explains Men Phalla, Head of DevOps Department at ABA Bank. “However, our existing monolithic environment made refactoring our code base especially time consuming whenever we wanted to adapt existing features or add new functionality.”
To simplify development, the bank decided to adopt a microservices architecture and started building a new environment based on open source solutions. Initial enthusiasm soon waned when the bank found that managing a containerized environment with purely open source tools was just as challenging as managing the previous monolithic architecture. In particular, ABA Bank lacked the deep visibility required to ensure robust security and maintain compliance with local financial regulations.
Even with the new microservices environment, ABA Bank had to take applications offline for up to two hours whenever it wanted to release new features. In addition, deploying security patches could take up to a month. The bank wanted to accelerate processes and reduce planned downtime to avoid the risk of customer dissatisfaction, churn or even reputational damage.
To overcome these challenges, ABA Bank sought a solution that would enable agility without compromising security.
“With SUSE Security, we can monitor containers in real time, detect threats and patch potential weaknesses — helping us to maintain world-class security standards for all our customer-facing and backend applications.”
Why Rancher Prime?
ABA Bank replaced its existing open source container management solution with Rancher Prime to enable seamless innovation. This equipped its internal experts with powerful tools for building, updating, deploying, securing and managing containerized workloads.
To ensure that Rancher Prime was the best-fit solution, ABA Bank ran a rigorous proof of concept to explore how the SUSE solution would combat some of the persistent issues that it experienced with its existing vanilla Kubernetes tools. In every test — from application and load testing to upgrading and patching — Rancher Prime outperformed the bank’s existing solution.
“Rancher Prime enables us to manage almost every aspect of our containerized environment, whether on cloud or on-premises, from a single pane of glass,” says Phalla. “Because of this, we expect that Rancher Prime will make it much easier for us to make the transition to a hybrid infrastructure in the years ahead.”
How Rancher Prime boosted availability, efficiency and cut costs
With SUSE Rancher Prime driving container management, ABA Bank can now seamlessly scale its customer-facing and back-end applications without creating additional IT maintenance workloads. At the same time, the SUSE solution delivers greater visibility into container performance — increasing transparency and enhancing regulatory compliance.
Provides 99.999% availability
Currently, ABA Bank is migrating its internet banking application to its new microservices architecture managed by Rancher Prime. The bank plans to move its mobile banking services to the new environment shortly after.
Based on findings from the POC with Rancher Prime, the bank anticipates that it will be able to achieve 99.999% availability for all customer-facing and critical applications. By increasing the availability of its services, the bank will no longer need to take applications offline for long periods to support maintenance and development activities, which the bank expects will increase customer satisfaction and significantly reduce the revenue loss associated with application downtime.
Accelerates new application deployments by 50%
Meanwhile, the DevOps team at ABA Bank is set to significantly improve operational efficiency by automating key tasks such as deployment, scaling and monitoring with Rancher Prime.
This will enable ABA Bank to deploy new applications 50% faster — increasing agility and supporting even shorter time-to-market for new services and features. Ultimately, this helps the bank’s DevOps team to maintain a laser focus on delighting customers with new innovations and helps to secure ABA Bank’s place at the top of Cambodia’s financial services sector.
“With our previous open source container management platform, we would frequently run into unexpected errors and we often struggled to find the root cause,” comments Phalla. “With Rancher Prime, we rarely run into any problems, and when we do, we can clearly see the cause and make the necessary changes.”
Reduces costs by up to 15%
Moving from its existing container management platform to Rancher Prime has helped ABA Bank reduce costs by up to 15% — releasing more resources for the bank to invest in innovation.
Why SUSE Security?
For ABA Bank, protecting customer funds and sensitive data is always a top priority. As such, the organization’s Information Security team always works diligently to ensure that core systems and services underpinning operations meet rigorous security standards and compliance requirements.
To mitigate security concerns associated with open source solutions and infrequent patching, the bank’s Information Security team required the IT department to source a dedicated container security solution. Already impressed with Rancher Prime, the DevOps team at ABA Bank explored the option of integrating SUSE Security into its new microservices environment.
“We wanted an easy way to spot and manage security risks across our broad application stack; SUSE Security was the answer,” explains Phalla. “With SUSE Security, we can monitor containers in real time, detect threats and patch potential weaknesses — helping us to maintain world-class security standards for all our customer-facing and back-end applications.”
The impact of SUSE Security
With its Kubernetes containers protected by SUSE Security, ABA Bank is equipped to defend against various cyberattacks while ensuring compliance with local financial services regulations. DevOps experts now gain near-instant insight into potential security issues and can use this information to apply quick, effective remediation.
“An added benefit of SUSE Security is access to professional, responsive support from SUSE,” says Phalla. “In an industry like banking, where every second counts and service disruption can lead to financial losses, being able to count on SUSE to overcome challenges is immensely valuable.”
What’s next for ABA Bank?
Looking ahead, ABA Bank is exploring the possibility of introducing new features and functionalities into its internet and mobile banking services — including AI-driven customer support assistants.
“With SUSE underpinning our internet and mobile banking platforms, we have much greater flexibility when it comes to innovation,” concludes Phalla. “We are excited by the transformative potential of AI. Having an open, flexible and secure containerized infrastructure means that we can innovate quickly and confidently.”