HSBC chooses Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer service to underpin digital

HSBC has chosen Oracle’s Cloud@Customer service to upgrade and migrate some of its database systems.

The bank will use Oracle’s managed infrastructure service in its own datacentres. The service is part of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

The two organisations said the platform will enable HSBC to continue its existing use of the supplier’s databases to support core banking systems in compliance with local data and security regulations.

They said a technical benefit will be that the bank will be able to automate legacy applications in a cloud environment and scale services with more flexibility.

Frank McGrath, chief technology officer at HSBC, said: “Our strategy is to digitise the bank at scale, so that we can innovate faster for customers, and our collaboration with Oracle is important in advancing this transformation agenda.

“We chose Exadata Cloud@Customer primarily for its ability to offer well-known databases, with the benefit of a database-as-a-service platform, giving us the performance and operational agility we need as we continue to grow and diversify our business.”

At Oracle Cloud World in Las Vegas this week, another UK-based company, Vodafone, endorsed the Cloud@Customer service.

Scott Petty, CIO at Vodafone, told a small group of UK press: “Everything to run our core telco business runs on Oracle databases. We are using OCI to modernise our infrastructure.

“Our cloud strategy had been very public cloud, and it took us a while to change our mindset, and convince everyone [internally] that OCI would be a better idea. People can be religious about cloud-native, and forget about why you are doing cloud.

“If you can get scalability, predictabilty, and the ability to horizontally scale the applications with cloud on-prem[ise], and all of your lifecycle management is taken care of, why would you care about what datacentre it’s in?”

Richard Smith, executive vice-president, technology, EMEA at Oracle, said: “Financial organisations are rapidly adopting new technologies and transforming their operations as they tap into new market opportunities while meeting more demanding data locality and privacy requirements.

“Our partnership with HSBC is based on achieving this balance, enabling it to consolidate critical systems on a secure, scalable on-premise cloud platform and develop cloud-based services faster. We look forward to our collaboration with HSBC as we help deliver the next generation of financial services.” 

In 2017, HSBC’s chief architect told Computer Weekly about how a desire to do more with its data was enlivening a cloud-first strategy, and how the international banking group had carried out five machine learning projects in that context.

Those projects included investigations into anti-money laundering, risk analytics and risk reporting, while also helping the bank to cut down the time it takes to conduct valuation and finance liquidity assessments.

At that time, the bank’s David Knott said the machine learning projects had been undertaken with Google, and the bank was using Amazon Web Services to stand up the test and development environments used to build and update its mobile applications.