The Bank of Philippine Islands (BPI) is the third largest bank in the Philippines with more than nine million customers, and enormous asset pool. Looking to boost its digital transformation course, BPI signed a multi-year services agreement with IBM. This deal will enable BPI to use IT infrastructure and hybrid cloud management services from IBM, supporting online, offline, mobile, ATM and branch banking services.
The $260 million multi-year services agreement will see Big Blue facilitate agile IT and hybrid cloud, backed by digital development of future ready financial technology.
“The rapidly changing business environment requires us to accelerate the pace of our digital transformation,” said Cezar P. Consing, president and CEO of BPI. “We need to continue to be responsive to an ever-changing financial market.
IBM’s service will offer “BORN IN THE CLOUD EXPERIENCES” at its core, developed to support BPI’s hybrid cloud strategy, including infrastructure as code and an open API consumption model. The aim is to deliver seamless technology that can be synergistically combined within the existing infrastructure or its private or public cloud environments.
“We are excited to be helping one of the leading banks in South East Asia and power its core IT infrastructure and bring new digital experiences with IBM Cloud in a secure and open environment to help prepare BPI for the future of banking.” Said Martin Jetter, senior vice president of IBM Global Technology Services.
The agreement taps off a billion dollar week for New York headquartered IBM following a few more enterprise level deals with the likes of Vodafone, Juniper and Watson. To support the next wave of digital transformation Vodafone is teaming up with IBM to develop a way to link all cloud computing systems such as machine learning on a super-fast fifth generation of telecom networks. Under an eight year managed services agreement IBM will offer tools such as artificial intelligence and automation to networked businesses. Another deal with Juniper Networks for a whopping $550 million dollars is for managing the networking vendor’s existing infrastructure, applications and IT services. Watson also choose IBM to manage support systems including data centres, help desk, data and voice networks across the world.
It has been a great week at IBM with an even greater week for financial technology and the world’s digital transformation at large. With more and more organisations realising the digital dream there are increasing opportunities in the field of networking, telecommunications, banking and finance.
