Kuwaiti FSI leader targets mobile computing and financial services governance in bold Digital Transformation programme.
Nutanix, a leader in enterprise cloud computing, has announced that Kuwait’s Warba Bank has digitally transformed its financial services and mobile banking using the power of Nutanix’s hyper-converged infrastructure platform.
Warba Bank was established in 2010 and currently runs 14 branches nationwide, with several further launches already in the pipeline. To keep pace with the changing demands of retail, private and corporate customers, and to align with its plans of continued growth, the bank began an ambitious Digital Transformation programme that targeted mobile applications and the governance of financial services.
“Mobile applications make our customers’ journeys so much easier,” said Wael Shawareb, Senior Director of Cybersecurity and IT Governance, Warba Bank. “But once you get into Digital Transformation in our sector, you have to consider the governance of financial services, which is very strict when it comes to data protection and privacy concerns. You have to make sure you implement your security levels in accordance with meticulous standards.”
In selecting Nutanix as a partner for digitisation, Shawareb and his team were drawn to Nutanix’s ability to integrate with Warba Bank’s legacy hypervisor.
He said: “Their understanding of the hypervisor running underneath showed that Nutanix were doing impeccable research into the back-to-back vendors, even for the non-related tickets relating to operating system issues. That, more than anything, showed us how solid they were. They were an ideal partner for us.”
Warba Bank’s journey to hyperconverged architecture began with software-defined storage. The organisation then migrated to full IT automation lifecycle management. By digitising its online banking services through Nutanix’s platforms, Warba Bank is now able to enhance the customer experience, by bringing newfound stability and simplicity to backend infrastructure, and delivering rich digital interfaces to its clients at the front end.
“The first thing we noticed after the implementation of Nutanix’s solution was the speed,” said Shawareb. “Once you realise that, ‘Oh, my goodness; I just created that server with all of that storage, and provisioned it faster than I have ever been able to do before,’ that is the moment where you understand just what profound change you have brought to your organisation by going with Nutanix. Their GUI, from the moment you log in, gives you the impression that you are dealing with the simplest ever infrastructure. Deployment was a dramatic mind shift for us.”
Nutanix also supported Warba’s stakeholders in their migration of the company’s critical mobile banking application. The core services of Warba’s mobile banking services run on top of Nutanix. A series of legacy vendors had to be integrated to carry Warba’s Digital Transformation ambitions forward. By simplifying management and maintenance, and by enhancing provisioning speeds, Warba Bank discovered that its IT function was freed up to innovate. The team can now concentrate on the enhancement of the customer experience.
“Today, banking customers of all types expect to have relationships with their assets and investments like they are in the palm of their hand,” Shawareb said. “That close, 24-7 relationship calls for a robust mobile banking offering with impenetrable security, high availability and low latency. We also need to be able to roll out enhancements to that customer experience in real time, with no disruption to service. Nutanix understood all of that. And for that reason, and many others, we now see them as a strategic technology partner for Warba Bank.”
Aaron White, Regional Sales Director, Middle East at Nutanix, said: “The regional FSI sector is one of the most fiercely competitive industries in operation today, with customers that have some of the highest expectations imaginable.
“The mobile computing and governance issues faced by Warba Bank are exactly the kinds of complexities that can be smoothed over by Nutanix technology that brings consumer-grade simplicity into enterprise data centres. We have enabled the bank to leverage agile, efficient, multi-cloud-capable IT to become a truly digital enterprise.”
