Founded in 1808 by King John VI of Portugal, Banco do Brasil (BB) is the oldest bank in Brazil and one of the longest-running financial institutions in the world. Headquartered in Brasília, the bank serves approximately 88 million customers across 13 countries, including the United States, Japan and Germany. Its portfolio spans individual banking, agribusiness financing, corporate and government services, and a wide range of digital offerings that support accessible, innovative financial solutions.
BB is also widely recognized for its sustainability leadership. Awards from organizations like Corporate Knights, which has named the bank the most sustainable bank in the world four times through its Global 100 ranking, reflect the bank’s long-term commitment to responsible growth and social and environmental impact.
With about 4,000 branches and a comprehensive digital and mobile banking platform, BB aims to improve lives and support a stronger future for the communities it serves. Roughly 94,000 employees support its global operations, including an IT department of 6,000 employees and 4,000 workers from various service providers who manage compute and storage infrastructure, internal ERP systems, employee devices and an extensive ATM network.
At-a-Glance
Banco do Brasil has accelerated development by 74% and shortened time-to-market by 5x while delivering secure, highly available financial services to millions. This was achieved by modernizing one of the world’s largest ATM networks, initially supporting over 43,000 ATMs, with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Desktop.
The significant growth in mobile banking, combined with the consolidation of withdrawal and deposit functionalities and the pioneering adoption of ATM recycling, has also allowed the reduction of the ATM fleet to approximately 23,000 machines, following in the footsteps of other major banks.
Modernizing an aging ATM fleet
In the past, BB had relied on a discontinued infrastructure supported by the IBM OS/2 operating system to maintain day-to-day operations across both servers and desktops. To boost performance and unlock flexibility, the bank had migrated its applications to a fragmented mix of Linux distributions, including openSUSE, Red Hat, Conectiva and Mandrake. However, this mixed OS environment was overly complex to manage and support, and had lower operational efficiency.
The bank recognized that to maintain streamlined operations for its mission-critical applications, it would need a robust, standardized, enterprise-grade system, and from 2013 it began acquiring SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop subscriptions. By 2017, BB standardized its branch terminal fleet on this distribution and continued to increase the number of its virtualized servers. Over the years, the SUSE solutions had proved reliable, but as BB continued growing and evolving its offering, new operational challenges emerged.
In particular, BB faced challenges with its ATM network. The ATMs typically have a lifecycle of 10-13 years, meaning that the bank must keep the OS modern and secure on aging hardware if it wants to avoid costly refreshes. Simultaneously, BB looked to utilize modern security infrastructures, such as the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) cryptoprocessors already present in some of its fleet, to protect the ATMs in a rapidly evolving cyber threat landscape. These challenges were compounded by the fact that ATMs rely on proprietary peripheral devices like card readers, biometric scanners and cash dispensers, which require custom driver integration.
In parallel, the bank looked to transform and streamline development processes, helping its large team package and deploy drivers and software quicker while staying compliant with the strict security regulations of the financial sector.
“With SUSE solutions, we’ve been able to create an automated deployment treadmill. BB developers no longer experience dependency hell. They just push code, and OBS automatically packages it for deployment.”
Berthonio de Medeiros Lucena,
IT Manager,
Banco do Brasil
Why SUSE Linux?
Updating SUSE Linux for ATMs
Banco do Brasil decided to maximize its infrastructure by migrating its ATMs (which run proprietary banking applications) to the latest version of SUSE Linux in a phased rollout, as it has been doing with its workstation fleet since 2017. This migration will enable the use of modern security features on existing hardware without requiring expensive replacements. To streamline this massive update, BB uses the AutoYaST component of SUSE Linux. AutoYaST enables the OS to detect the hardware environment and automatically configure itself according to the specific model, peripherals and location, allowing rapid, zero-touch deployments across the geographically dispersed network throughout the vast territory of Brazil.
SUSE Linux for internal users
Beyond the ATM network, starting in 2017, BB has standardized on SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop for its bank teller and business user as well as developer workstations. By unifying the OS for development, business and ATM operations, BB enhances security for its mission-critical code and boosts developer productivity.
Key to the bank’s decision to double down on this partnership was SUSE’s dedication to innovation. For example, the Open Build Service (OBS) enables the secure, standardized and traceable storage, compilation and packaging of a wide range of software. Using OBS, the bank can ingest hardware vendor source code, compile and package applications (including drivers and security agents) and distribute standardized RPM packages for consistent use for its solutions with less effort and a reduced error rate for its developers.
SUSE Linux for private cloud at BB
After relying on SUSE solutions for over 15 years, BB decided to solidify its partnership with SUSE by making SUSE Linux Enterprise Server the strategic backbone for its mission-critical operations. For example, BB continues to rely on the SUSE solution as the OS for a significant portion of the virtual machines (VMs) in its centralized private cloud infrastructure.
Over the years, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server has delivered rock-solid reliability and enterprise-grade security, seamlessly supporting diverse workloads, from internal services to external customers served by BB’s hosting infrastructure, and is currently the default operating system for new virtualized server instances.
Why SUSE Premium Support?
As part of its standardization on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Desktop, BB wanted the reassurance of reliable, enterprise-grade support. With millions of customers and government organizations relying on around-the-clock services from BB, the bank must be able to rectify any problems rapidly. BB chose SUSE Premium Support, which gives the bank direct access to a named trusted SUSE expert, to ensure swift resolution for its key services.
“SUSE’s Open Build Service and Premium Support have significantly raised the level of services provided by SUSE for Banco do Brasil,” comments Ricardo Rocha Pires, Technical Manager at Banco do Brasil. “They enabled the integration of our complex and vast environment with a huge number of hardware and software solutions acquired by the bank from other vendors over the past 15 years, in addition to offering a framework that has boosted productivity for our developers.”
The impact of SUSE solutions
Supports critical financial services worldwide
By standardizing on SUSE Linux, BB has been able to maintain its large IT network for over a decade with a lean internal team. Today, SUSE Linux supports approximately 55,000 machines including ATMs, ticket dispersing terminals, customer service terminals, bank teller workstations and business user workstations at BB. With SUSE solutions acting as the cornerstone of critical operations, BB can provide highly available, reliable services to millions.
The bank’s private cloud hosts over 63,000 VMs, of which 60% run on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. This infrastructure supports not only BB’s internal operations, but also national services, like the PIX instant payment platform, which allows instant, 24/7 transfers between individuals, companies and government organizations. PIX is the main payment system in Brazil, created by the Brazilian Central Bank, with over 70% of the country using it to complete transactions. PIX has been responsible for over 64 billion transactions in 2024, moving around R$ 26.5 billion (or ~USD 5 billion), as reported by the Central Bank of Brazil. It’s estimated that BB transacts over 33,000 transactions per second on average.
Automates hardware configuration
The use of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop enabled BB to standardize and reuse software installed on a wide variety of hardware, across tens of thousands of machines. In particular, using AutoYaST enables the bank to manage its vast computer network automatically, freeing the IT team to focus on other tasks.
The flexibility of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server allows BB to use the latest version of the OS on older hardware, maintaining performance and mitigating security risks. Today, BB’s ATMs feature a certificate-based authentication solution for network access control, helping to protect the bank and its millions of users from financial fraud and cyberthreats.
By migrating ATMs to the up-to-date version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, BB can also avoid premature hardware refreshes, thereby supporting cost-effective operations, aligning with BB’s sustainability targets and enabling increased security for the environment.
Enables 5x shorter time-to-market
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop supports around 1,000 developer workstations and 20,000 bank teller and service workstations at BB. By leveraging OBS, a core SUSE technology used to build and package SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop itself, BB has introduced modern CI/CD pipelines across its infrastructure.
OBS is used internally to coordinate, standardize and publish changes across BB’s environment, from ATM software and drivers to desktop workloads. While OBS is not a standalone commercial product, it plays a critical role in ensuring consistency, security and repeatability, using the same industry-grade tooling SUSE relies on to maintain its own enterprise distributions.
As a result, BB has reduced development time by up to 74% and shortened time-to-market for new terminal and server features by up to five times.
“With SUSE solutions, we’ve been able to create an automated deployment treadmill,” explains Berthonio de Medeiros Lucena, IT Manager at Banco do Brasil. “BB developers no longer experience dependency hell. They just push code, and OBS automatically packages it for deployment.”
Boosts developer productivity and security
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop’s adaptability empowers BB’s large development team to stay agile and secure. For example, the bank has developed a custom self-service app store on GNOME, the default desktop environment for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, which streamlines operations by providing pre-prepared applications for developers to use. This also helps reinforce security, as BB no longer has to give developers administrative rights on their workstations to enable them to use applications and drivers.
“Our developers work in languages ranging from COBOL and C to Python, Node.js and Java,” says Pires. “SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop has the flexibility and power to meet all of their needs.”
The impact of SUSE Premium Support
Beyond rapid response times, SUSE Premium Support provides Banco do Brasil with a named support engineer who has built deep familiarity with the bank’s environment over time. Acting as a technical bridge between BB, SUSE and the many hardware vendors supplying ATM systems and peripherals, this engineer plays a critical role in coordinating fixes, validating drivers and aligning changes across the ecosystem. The close working relationship also supports strategic planning and the development of custom solutions tailored to BB’s highly specialized infrastructure.
“Over the years, SUSE has never breached the 15-minute SLA for initial response to a ticket,” says Pires. “And, unlike our other vendors, our SUSE Premium Support engineer is proactive, providing custom kernel patches and recompilations within days when unique hardware incompatibility issues arise.”
What’s next for Banco do Brasil?
Today, BB is continuing the phased migration to the latest version of SUSE Linux across its ATM fleet, further strengthening the security of its large network.
Looking further ahead, the bank is exploring the possible adoption of SUSE Multi-Linux Manager to create a single centralized console for managing and patching its SUSE Linux environments, with the flexibility to support hybrid deployments over time.
“SUSE offers a true partnership,” concludes Lucena. “Particularly for our ATM modernization project, the SUSE team is acting as an extension of our engineering team. We look forward to exploring how other SUSE solutions will help us streamline operations and strengthen our position in the financial sector.”
BB is also interested in exploring the recently-announced new AI capabilities of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16, and how these features can help further optimize the entire day-to-day operation of their servers, desktops and ATMs.