Clydesdale, Yorkshire and Virgin Money opt for OpenShift digital push

CYBG, owner of Clydesdale Bank, Yorkshire Bank and Virgin Money, is using Red Hat’s OpenShift platform to expand and standardise its digital banking efforts, enabling it to accelerate application development and deliver services to customers more quickly.

“In the current climate, a bank needs to differentiate itself, and this can come from not only delivering a more consistent, omni-channel service, but finding where to add value,” said Denis Blackwood, head of IT services at CYBG.

“We want to establish our position as a leading digital bank and grow our retail customer base through digital services. With Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, we’re already starting to see gains in the productivity of IT and application development – and we expect this will help us make savings in time and effort for the bank, as well as giving us greater firepower to innovate,” he said.

As part of its digital transformation strategy, CYBG created a digital platform, called iB, to help customers manage their money. It then built a common platform to unify its services, based on microservices and a traditional IT architecture and created standard services and features that could be deployed easily across the different banks operated by CYBG. This has allowed each of the operating banks to create custom services to respond to unique customer needs.

The banking group used Red Hat OpenShift to provide a single foundation for building, deploying and scaling applications faster across its current on-premise requirements. The platform has also given CYBG the opportunity to scale into the cloud in the future as its needs evolve.

CYBG said its developer teams were now more productive as they could access to an OpenShift environment within five minutes, compared to the three weeks it often took with the previous environment.

Using OpenShift has also allowed the bank’s iB platform to scale from 40,000 logins per day to over one million.