Nationwide Building Society taps Red Hat for new Business Integration Platform
Nationwide Building Society, the largest retail bank in the UK, and the world’s largest building society, serving over 16 million members, is working with Red Hat, an open source solutions provider owned by IBM, to build and scale a new Business Integration Platform (BIP).
Nationwide builds Business Integration Platform with Red Hat
The building society is leveraging its supplier’s Kubernetes-powered hybrid cloud application solution, Red Hat OpenShift, to develop its new event-driven integration platform.
Harnessing open source technologies like Kafka for distributed event storage and stream processing, and MongoDB for database management, the BIP is expected to enable Nationwide to support one-time password (OTP) authentication and SAP systems, achieve fivefold increases in processing speed, maintain high service availability, and deploy upgrades across its 140 servers with enhanced speed and agility.
The BIP is intended to serve as the next iteration of a platform Nationwide previously developed using Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, known as Speed Layer.
Speed Layer was designed to enable the building society to respond quickly to events that could potentially cause service outages.
Its successor is now being adopted as “the foundation for strategic operations” across the building society using Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud and on-premise Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
The BIP team “is prepared for future migration of critical production workloads to the cloud within the next year” with plans to “continue scaling the platform to support every function across the organisation”, according to a statement by Red Hat.
Grant Valentine, who Nationwide has appointed to head the BIP, comments: “As digital requirements continue to evolve, whether volume of payments, banking app users, regulation, or system scalability, we have to be prepared for as yet unknown demands and channels.
“Our BIP powers many of our strategic initiatives and running it on Red Hat OpenShift gives us hybrid cloud choice, robust performance and business agility.”
