Fransabank: Delighting customers with responsive and reliable in-branch, web and mobile banking
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- Asia
Country
- Lebanon
Product
- IBM Power 870 servers
- IBM DS8870
- IBM FlashSystem
- IBM Spectrum Virtualize
- IBM Storwize V7000
Tech Stack
- IBM AIX
- IBM i
- IBM WebSphere Application Server
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Customer Satisfaction
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
Applicable Industries
- Finance & Insurance
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Process Control & Optimization
- Predictive Maintenance
Services
- System Integration
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
About The Customer
Fransabank is the oldest and among the largest of Lebanon’s banks, providing universal banking services through 124 branches. The bank has offices in nine other countries and reported net profits of USD179.8 million in financial year 2015 with total assets of USD20 billion. Fransabank has achieved exceptional growth in recent years. FY 2014 saw the successful acquisition of another major bank, contributing to year-on-year growth of 11.66 percent in total assets and 12.75 percent in shareholders’ equity. And from a peak year-on-year growth rate of 40.88 percent in 2011, net loans to customers have since settled to around 10 percent in year-on-year growth—still a highly impressive figure.
The Challenge
Fransabank, one of Lebanon's largest banks, was experiencing rapid business growth that was putting a strain on its core systems. The bank was concerned about the performance of critical batch processing tasks at the start and end of each working day, and at the end of each month. These processing tasks, which ensure that all transactions are applied accurately and all accounts reconciled, are effectively a statutory requirement as well as enabling the bank to have an accurate view of its business performance. As the business grew rapidly and continuously, a main pillar of their IT strategy was to implement a robust, scalable and highly performing infrastructure capable of accompanying the business growth by processing a larger volume of data and transactions in less time. This would avoid any potential future service impact and secure the end-of-day processing before the branches opened at 8 am—without any concerns about the significant volume growth.
The Solution
Fransabank decided to deploy a completely new SAB AT core banking solution, with the back-office components running on the IBM i operating system and the front-office components running on IBM WebSphere Application Server on the IBM AIX operating system. Both components run side-by-side on IBM PowerVM on the same IBM Power 870 server in the production environment, and the landscape is duplicated in a second data center for protection against disaster. When it comes to ensuring exceptional end-to-end performance and high availability for critical systems, the storage layer is a vital consideration. Fransabank reviewed options from leading global vendors before selecting IBM DS8870 enterprise disk systems at the heart of a new virtualized storage landscape. Complementing the DS8870 systems in its primary and DR sites, Fransabank deployed IBM FlashSystem solutions to provide a “tier zero” of ultra-fast storage and IBM Storwize V7000 systems to provide flexible internally tiered storage for files and archived data. The entire landscape is virtualized using IBM Spectrum Virtualize, which enables Fransabank to manage sophisticated policy-based migration of data up and down the tiers as performance requirements change.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Case Study missing?
Start adding your own!
Register with your work email and create a new case study profile for your business.
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Real-time In-vehicle Monitoring
The telematic solution provides this vital premium-adjusting information. The solution also helps detect and deter vehicle or trailer theft – as soon as a theft occurs, monitoring personnel can alert the appropriate authorities, providing an exact location.“With more and more insurance companies and major fleet operators interested in monitoring driver behaviour on the grounds of road safety, efficient logistics and costs, the market for this type of device and associated e-business services is growing rapidly within Italy and the rest of Europe,” says Franco.“The insurance companies are especially interested in the pay-per-use and pay-as-you-drive applications while other organisations employ the technology for road user charging.”“One million vehicles in Italy currently carry such devices and forecasts indicate that the European market will increase tenfold by 2014.However, for our technology to work effectively, we needed a highly reliable wireless data network to carry the information between the vehicles and monitoring stations.”
Case Study
Safety First with Folksam
The competitiveness of the car insurance market is driving UBI growth as a means for insurance companies to differentiate their customer propositions as well as improving operational efficiency. An insurance model - usage-based insurance ("UBI") - offers possibilities for insurers to do more efficient market segmentation and accurate risk assessment and pricing. Insurers require an IoT solution for the purpose of data collection and performance analysis
Case Study
Smooth Transition to Energy Savings
The building was equipped with four end-of-life Trane water cooled chillers, located in the basement. Johnson Controls installed four York water cooled centrifugal chillers with unit mounted variable speed drives and a total installed cooling capacity of 6,8 MW. Each chiller has a capacity of 1,6 MW (variable to 1.9MW depending upon condenser water temperatures). Johnson Controls needed to design the equipment in such way that it would fit the dimensional constraints of the existing plant area and plant access route but also the specific performance requirements of the client. Morgan Stanley required the chiller plant to match the building load profile, turn down to match the low load requirement when needed and provide an improvement in the Energy Efficiency Ratio across the entire operating range. Other requirements were a reduction in the chiller noise level to improve the working environment in the plant room and a wide operating envelope coupled with intelligent controls to allow possible variation in both flow rate and temperature. The latter was needed to leverage increased capacity from a reduced number of machines during the different installation phases and allow future enhancement to a variable primary flow system.
Case Study
Automated Pallet Labeling Solution for SPR Packaging
SPR Packaging, an American supplier of packaging solutions, was in search of an automated pallet labeling solution that could meet their immediate and future needs. They aimed to equip their lines with automatic printer applicators, but also required a solution that could interface with their accounting software. The challenge was to find a system that could read a 2D code on pallets at the stretch wrapper, track the pallet, and flag any pallets with unread barcodes for inspection. The pallets could be single or double stacked, and the system needed to be able to differentiate between the two. SPR Packaging sought a system integrator with extensive experience in advanced printing and tracking solutions to provide a complete traceability system.
Case Study
Transforming insurance pricing while improving driver safety
The Internet of Things (IoT) is revolutionizing the car insurance industry on a scale not seen since the introduction of the car itself. For decades, premiums have been calculated using proxy-based risk assessment models and historical data. Today, a growing number of innovative companies such as Quebec-based Industrielle Alliance are moving to usage-based insurance (UBI) models, driven by the advancement of telematics technologies and smart tracking devices.
Case Study
MasterCard Improves Customer Experience Through Self-Service Data Prep
Derek Madison, Leader of Business Financial Support at MasterCard, oversees the validation of transactions and cash between two systems, whether they’re MasterCard owned or not. He was charged with identifying new ways to increase efficiency and improve MasterCard processes. At the outset, the 13-person team had to manually reconcile system interfaces using reports that resided on the company’s mainframe. Their first order of business each day was to print 20-30 individual, multi-page reports. Using a ruler to keep their place within each report, they would then hand-key the relevant data, line by line, into Excel for validation. “We’re talking about a task that took 40-80 hours each week,” recalls Madison, “As a growing company with rapidly expanding product offerings, we had to find a better way to prepare this data for analysis.”
