Bendigo and Adelaide Bank tap IBM cloud for app development

Bendigo and Adelaide Bank has scooped IBM Cloud as its preferred cloud application development platform, a move that assists the bank in developing new products and services for its 1.6 million customers.

The bank, considered Australia’s fifth largest, operates five distinct brands including: Adelaide Bank (third party banking), Bendigo Wealth (wealth management), Rural Bank and Rural Finance (agribusiness), and Bendigo Bank (retail banking), which includes the Bank’s Community Bank network.

Bank executive, business enablement, Stella Thredgold, said the bank has deployed Bluemix to build, test and deploy timely and cost effective solutions that respond to customer needs.

“The way our customers engage with us and the service they need is changing, and fast. IBM Cloud gives us the agility and security needed to better deliver innovative customer solutions across multiple platforms,” Thredgold said.

“It means we can operate with a start-up mindset with our speed-to-market capability enhanced, and this will ultimately deliver the best outcome to our customers.”

As the bank aims to be “Australia’s most customer-connected bank”, the latest move to adopt Big Blue’s cloud technology aims to accelerate development of new applications up to 10 times faster, transforming customer service and giving the Bank “start-up” speed and agility.

The technology lets the Bank run multiple workloads at varying stages in parallel with greater efficiency, and delivery teams no longer have to manage or be restrained by environment provisioning or limited resources, she said.

The move to adopt IBM’s cloud application development platform is the latest in a series of steps towards digital enablement for the bank. The capability of the IBM cloud environment was well tested when the bank developed and deployed its Redy app, which offers customers a secure, fast and easy-to-use mobile payment method via QR (Quick Response) code that sees users offer credits to community groups of their choice.

IBM Cloud CTO, A/NZ, Andrew Kupetz, said IBM Cloud is changing how governments, enterprises and start-ups across Australia define customer service, transform operations and create new revenue streams. Bluemix offers a unique proposition to the banking industry, in particular, which is seeing an increase in disruptors entering the sector.

“Traditional banks that make the move to cloud will have the agility, speed and innovation to win out against these new disruptors and lead the industry,” Kupetz said.