BBVA is committed to digital transformation, and has successfully met customer demands for online services with an updated customer website and new mobile apps. In fact, in 2017, its app was named the best mobile banking app in the world by Forrester Research.^[1] However, this new functionality increased the burden on BBVA’s backend systems. To meet this additional demand, BBVA needed to update its IT environment. “In the past, we used vertical growth models,” said José María Ruesta, global head of infrastructure, service, and open systems with BBVA. “We know that we have to go to a horizontal growth model to meet the needs of customers who connect and demand 24-hour-a-day functionality from anywhere on the planet.”

[1] Forrester Research, “Global Mobile Banking Benchmark, 2017.” 13 July, 2017. https://www.forrester.com/report/Global+Mobile+Banking+Benchmark+2017/-/E-RES137691#

To provide needed support for its digital transactions, BBVA used Red Hat enterprise open source solutions to build a single, global cloud platform. The platform is fully automated, self-served, and data-centric—combining real-time and batch data. The platform supports existing, business-critical workloads, like new credit card contracts, claims, loans, and mortgages. “We want to gain a competitive advantage by working with the best platform, partners, and talent,” said Ruesta. “Being an enterprise with many years of history is not a guarantee of success. Adapting quickly to this digital transformation is a must for our organization. The moment is now—tomorrow could be too late.”

The new solution is expected to reduce costs—both for BBVA and its customers, increase efficiency, and offer better visibility for proactive service improvements. Overall, the new platform will provide a better customer experience. “We believe the Red Hat technology will help facilitate innovation at BBVA and allow engineers to accelerate the transformation of processes to be more digital, more automatic, more convenient for customers, and definitely more efficient,” said Raquel Martín, global head of business process architecture and artificial intelligence technology with BBVA. Also, because the platform is global, developers can easily deploy code across different regions, speeding time to market. “Now, developers don’t need to worry about whether they need a small or big server to run their apps,” said Ruesta. “They just need to push a button.”