Banfico Banks on Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS for Faster DevOps and Scalability

Banfico is a provider of back-office and white-label systems to support open banking initiatives for established banks and other financial services providers. Open banking uses application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow safe access to banking data by other software. That means that account holders can use a range of third-party applications to help run their finances, savings, and pensions while relying on secure and regulated data transfer of sensitive financial information from their bank account to the applications. There are currently about 7 million open banking users in the UK.

Banfico uses Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), which offers managed OpenShift integration in the cloud. ROSA is an enterprise Kubernetes container platform for developing, deploying, securing, and scaling applications faster. It means Banfico’s DevOps teams can build and deploy applications more quickly because it provides self-service provisioning, automatic security enforcement, and streamlined deployment.

Banfico worked with AWS Partner Red Hat to deploy ROSA, which can speed up application feature development by 30–40 percent. “We’ve worked with other providers, but ROSA is our platform of choice,” says Paulo Barbosa, chief operating officer at Banfico. “It gives us the scalability and global availability that we need.” ROSA provides access to more than 170 AWS services across compute, database, analytics, machine learning (ML), networking, and mobile functions.

As a startup, Banfico must deal with the challenges of predicting future demand. Signing up a new bank to its roster can mean scaling systems to support thousands of account holders. Using ROSA, its systems can scale automatically and quickly with minimal risk of breaking regulatory service-level agreements for both availability and speed of response. “Banfico’s teams and customers were growing, and it wanted to get ahead of its consumption,” says Mone Hussain, account manager at Red Hat. “Working in collaboration with AWS we helped them get the right mix of reserved and on-demand resources and deepen their understanding of what they were using.”

Banfico wanted to offer a solution to banks requiring a Confirmation of Payee (CoP) service in the UK and International Bank Account Number (IBAN) Name Checker globally. These are the protocols consumers go through when they want to set up a new payee on their account or confirm other details. The service sends a request to the recipient’s bank to check that the name, sort code, and account number (or IBAN) match. The service then sends a message back to the payee bank.

This provides either a confirmation message, a “the name is nearly identical” message, or a mismatch or notification that no check was possible. This offers a low-friction way to reduce fraud and help customers send money to the right recipient. The service must work accurately and quickly to match regulatory requirements and to satisfy customers who need fast confirmation for internet or mobile banking.

Demand for services like IBAN Name Checker and CoP comes from a mixture of demand led by regulators, by banks on fraud concerns, and by customers wanting the reassurance of checks when making payments. It is currently a requirement in the European Union (EU) but not yet compulsory for compliance. ROSA allows Banfico to react fast and adjust its systems to satisfy changing regulations.

Open banking is highly regulated in terms of data protection and availability. Systems must satisfy the security requirements of ISO/IEC 27001 certification. Banfico must also comply with the revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2), which requires accurate logging of any downtime whether planned or unplanned. Using ROSA, Banfico is meeting the 99.95 percent availability requirement. ROSA also makes it easier for Banfico to deal with different regulatory frameworks in different countries. For instance, in the UK, CoP allows for greater data exchange than is permitted in the EU.

In addition to having the flexibility to tailor services to different markets, Banfico is also saving money using ROSA. The company was an early adopter of ROSA—a so-called “walk in” user accessing the service through the AWS Console—but since moving to a private-offer agreement with Red Hat and consolidating its AWS spending, it saves about 55 percent compared to its previous spending for customers with predictable usage. “We’ve got better control of costs because we’ve got near-real-time visibility of transactions and volumes,” says Barbosa. “That means we can act fast if we need to. We can cope with seasonal peaks, peaks from new products, and demand from new customers.”

About half of Banfico’s customers are currently on the ROSA platform and it plans to migrate the remainder in the coming months. The company will soon start using hosted control panes from Red Hat—which help manage workloads—to further reduce cluster costs and provide the ease of a single-pane-of-glass oversight.

ROSA also brings efficiencies to Banfico’s procurement of other IT services and applications. “Because ROSA works through the AWS Marketplace it is easier for developers to procure other services without having to manage multiple vendors,” says Hussain. “There are no purchase orders or other bureaucracy, just quick access to other platforms like automation and machine learning.”

ROSA will also support the company’s global expansion as Banfico begins offering services in South America and Asia. Using one platform eases pressure on internal operations teams but also ensures a unified level of service for all customers wherever they are in the world. “We have total confidence that Red Hat and AWS have the global availability to give our customers the service they need,” says Barbosa.