AIB, an Irish bank with key positions across various segments, and IBM (NYSE: IBM) have announced a €65 million 3-year agreement designed to help “deliver the bank’s 2023 strategy by accelerating its ongoing digital transformation, meeting its customer-first commitment and providing a clear pathway to a hybrid Cloud technology environment.”
Under the agreement, IBM will offer AIB with a next-gen IBM z15 compute platform along with an extensive tech portfolio which includes IBM’s Cloud Pak solutions and “the capability to deliver services leveraging Red Hat OpenShift,” according to a release.
This will help AIB to “sustain its high pace of digitalization and its strong focus on security and resilience,” the announcement added.
Fergal Coburn, Group CTO, AIB, stated:
“As we accelerate into the future of banking, we need the most advanced technology to underpin our ongoing digital transformation efforts. IBM technology has been the backbone of our service delivery for over 30 years and this agreement maintains our relationship in the innovation space. This will be a core contributor in ensuring that we achieve the key technology objectives that underpin our 2023 strategic ambitions and to meet the challenges faced in our industry.”
The IBM tech platform will further improve AIB’s cyber resilience and fraud detection capabilities, “ensuring its digital services remain highly performant, available and secure for its customers.”
The tech portfolio which includes data analytics and process automation tools offers key capabilities, selected specifically to “complement AIB’s existing technology roadmap and business requirements.” It will also enable “enhanced system availability capabilities which will support the bank’s approach to Operational Resilience,” the update revealed.
Deborah Threadgold, Country GM, IBM Ireland remarked:
“This agreement continues AIB’s successful strategy of being at the forefront of digital transformation in the Irish banking industry. The IBM z15 is a key part of the bank’s overall hybrid cloud strategy and will enable AIB to efficiently and securely manage traditional operations and provide AIB’s highly experienced team the tools to deliver new digital services in a very agile manner.”
Graham Fagan, Group Director of Enterprise Technology & Cloud Engineering, AIB, added:
“As financial organisations progress on their cloud journeys, they need an approach that allows various cloud-based applications to work in concert. Our hybrid cloud strategy is helping us to simplify our technological infrastructure so that we can move and manage data, services and workflows across multiple clouds and on premise platforms. The IBM products and services we are acquiring allow us to further extend that hybrid cloud ambition in an innovative, agile, secure and compliant manner.”
The agreement was “signed in Q4 2021,” the update confirmed.
