Simple and secure: EUVIC has developed a credit portal for a bank that is hosted in the Open Telekom Cloud. Picture: Deutsche Telekom AG
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The traditional financial sector is under pressure. Since the turn of the millennium, a quarter of bank branches have had to close. Internet banks are pushing their way into the market and making traditional financial institutions steal customers away. Large technology groups are also increasingly entering the mobile payment business. But the industry is reacting:
With digitalization, the financial institutions now not only want to work more efficiently – but above all they want to focus more on the customer. Like the German state of Saarland's regional bank, SaarLB, which relies on the software company EUVIC and the Open Telekom Cloud for its new loan portal for business customers.
Like all banks, SaarLB holds confidential data – and is obliged to take special care when processing it. "The Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) places very high demands on financial institutions like ours," says Dr. Matthias Böcker, the chairman of the board at SaarLB, one of the largest financial institutions in Saarland. That’s understandable. After all, banks, savings banks and their internal and external IT service providers operate critical infrastructures. Their customers’ sensitive data requires special protection. Böcker: "Of course, as financial experts we are aware of the advantages of the cloud – but we often approach it with restraint at first because it represents uncharted territory for all institutions.”
The software company EUVIC was able to dispel the security concerns of the bank. The developers from Leverkusen have developed a loan portal for SaarLB that allows loan requests from their business customers to be processed interactively and quickly. This is no easy undertaking since the aim is not only to map the interaction with the customer digitally, but also to guarantee the highest possible level of data security and data protection at all times.
To achieve this balancing act, the renowned software company uses the Open Telekom Cloud as the basis for its solution. "Because Telekom's servers are located in highly secure, multiple-certified German data centers," says Daniel Piecha, CEO of EUVIC, explaining his choice. This provides companies such as SaarLB with the necessary conditions to meet both the standards of the supervisory authorities and the strict rules of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Both the loan portal's test and productive systems run in the Open Telekom Cloud but only authorized employees of the bank have unencrypted access to the data in the productive system, Piecha explains. In addition, to ensure a very high level of security, a neutral third-party company was commissioned to carry out a penetration test and check the security concept.
The high level of security was not the only argument that convinced SaarLB to opt for the software company from Leverkusen. Frank-Oliver Groß, who is responsible for the customer portal at SaarLB: "EUVIC impressed us with Telekom's secure operations solution – but also with its speed and the expertise of its development team.” It took the EUVIC team just four months to develop the new loan portal for business customers for Landesbank Saar. How can this speed be explained? "Around 1,500 experts work for us worldwide," says Piecha, "three quarters of them are employed at a senior level and are therefore proven specialists." The teams are also organized in an agile manner using the Scrum methodology. According to Piecha, the Open Telekom Cloud offers greater agility because any service can be used on demand and set up in just a few minutes.
EUVIC is continuing to work on the functional scope of the portal solution. "In our solution, we initially implemented the most important functions for the loan business with corporate customers. Further functionalities as well as opening up to other loan segments, such as the real estate business, are being planned," said Frank-Oliver Groß from SaarLB.
"Going forward, the portal solution that has already been developed will form the nucleus for a loan platform," says Piecha. Further components and modules, for example for customer relationship management (CRM) or business management, can be easily integrated for the bank based on the open architecture concept. Instead of a fragmented application landscape with a high degree of interface complexity, banks are thus provided with an up-to-date homogeneous platform that is precisely tailored to their needs and is highly capable of being integrated into the worlds of corporate customers. This opens up completely new forms of collaboration and business opportunities.
EUVIC intends to use the Open Telekom Cloud in future customer projects as well: "Because our developers got to grips with it straight away, they really appreciate the Telekom solution," says Piecha. Especially since their Cloud Container Engine (CCE) based on Kubernetes makes it easier for their experts to work in the cloud, explains Daniel Piecha. This enables developers to set up, deploy, cluster and scale cloud containers automatically, quickly and easily.
This speeds up and simplifies many things: "For us, the Cloud Container Engine is a great tool that helps us develop, test, operate and maintain the applications," says Piecha. For example, EUVIC uses the Cloud Container Engine to boot up development environments with the necessary programming tools and scripting languages quickly and automatically on virtual machines. CCE offers standard conformity and at the same time the comfort of a managed service, Piecha adds.
However, EUVIC's developers and architects like the Open Telekom Cloud for another reason: It’s based on OpenStack – "and this means that the innovations of the global open source community are available to us," says Piecha. In fact, the huge OpenStack community consists of established IT companies like Deutsche Telekom as well as agile start-ups that are constantly driving forward the development of the cloud operating system. EUVIC also benefits from this innovative strength with the Open Telekom Cloud.
For compliance reasons, not only the financial industry, but numerous companies in all industries are allowed to process certain data exclusively within their own walls – but not in a cloud. This is where the Open Telekom Cloud offers another key advantage: It is also available as a hybrid cloud. Piecha: "Thanks to our cooperation with Deutsche Telekom, we can now also offer our customers hybrid scenarios. There is an increasing demand for such scenarios, particularly in the finance sector," says Piecha. "With the Open Telekom Cloud Hybrid Solution, private and public entities can be operated on identical hardware and software components.” This means that everything is compatible with each other – and Deutsche Telekom offers the same first, second and third-level support for the private instances as for the public cloud instances. Piecha: "This takes a lot of the pressure off the companies' IT departments." The expert therefore sees great potential for the hybrid cloud in the financial sector in particular.
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