Ashur International Bank has partnered with US-based cloud computing company Nutanix to drive digital banking in Iraq.
Through the partnership, the Iraqi bank will scale the deployment of innovative cloud-native apps with Red Hat OpenShift on Nutanix.
Ashur International Bank aims to implement 24×7 self-service, robo-advisors, artificial intelligence (AI)-driven kiosks, and voice biometrics as part of its five-year digital transformation programme.
According to Nutanix, the bank was able to set up and operate Nutanix Enterprise Private Cloud just after a three week-long deployment process.
Ashur International Bank’s multiple point-to-point integrations were replaced by easy-to-manage microservices and application programming interfaces (APIs).
This has helped the bank’s IT team to witness a sharp decline in operational overheads. The bank also estimates that full return on investment (ROI) on the project will be achieved within a few months.
Currently, the IT team is developing a new smart payments module which is said to be the first of its kind in Iraq.
By bringing together voice biometrics and natural language processing (NLP) chatbots, the bank will help its customers to be swiftly authenticated. This will also help them to make transactions by easily conversing with an automated virtual teller.
Ashur International Bank digital transformation head Bashar Al-otaibi said: “Our prime requirement was to run our critical workloads on Openshift and our strategy was to run this on a robust Kubernetes platform that could seamlessly integrate with Nutanix.
“With their jointly-validated design, Nutanix and Red Hat were able to demonstrate the value of Openshift as an enterprise-grade Kubernetes platform for mission-critical applications. This gave us the level of confidence needed as a bank to proceed with this design.”
