French lender BNP Paribas has extended its agreement with IBM for eight more years as the bank looks to accelerate its cloud strategy in support of a digitization transformation plan.
Image: BNP Paribas and IBM partner on cloud deployment. Photo: Courtesy of BNP Paribas.
The latest collaboration further extends the two companies’ establishment of the IT services company BNP Paribas Partners for Innovation (BP2I). Both BNP Paribas and IBM hold equal stake in the joint venture since 2003.
BNP Paribas stated that the latest agreement will help the bank to meet its customers’ expectations in areas such as real-time banking and mobile services.
As part of the deal, the French lender will integrate IBM Cloud solutions, hosted in dedicated BNP Paribas data centers. The agreement will also allow the bank to strengthen its ability to subscribe to ‘As a Service’ IT services via IBM Public Cloud.
BNP Paribas said that it will not use the public cloud for either customer data or production environments with sensitive information in order to ensure the security of its customers’ data.
Leveraging IBM’s expertise, the French lender’s cloud approach will allow the bank to gain agility, ensuring the performance of its IT systems and safety. It is also designed to improve the “Time to Market” for new digital applications and services.
The collaboration will allow BNP Paribas to use IBM Hybrid Cloud solutions to increase its services by using multiple environments such as dedicated, public and private clouds, ensuring integration between these different environments.
Furthermore, the agreement will also help enable the bank’s ability to improve the integration and optimization of workload management between the various cloud infrastructure services.
In October, the French bank closed the acquisition of core banking operations of Raiffeisen Bank Polska in Poland. The bank was merged with its subsidiary, BGZ BNP Paribas.
The core bank includes business of Raiffeisen Bank Polska (RBPL), excluding the foreign currency retail mortgage loan portfolio and excluding a limited amount of other assets. Corporate and retail gross loans of the bank amount to PLN19bn (€4.4bn) and customer deposits amount to PLN34bn (€7.9bn) for 2017 year-end.