AIB, an Irish bank with market-leading positions across key segments, and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a €65m three-year agreement designed to help deliver the bank’s 2023 strategy by accelerating its ongoing digital transformation, meeting its customer-first commitment, and providing a clear pathway to a hybrid cloud technology environment.
Under the agreement, IBM will provide AIB with a next-generation IBM z15 compute platform along with an extensive technology portfolio which includes IBM’s Cloud Pak solutions and the capability to deliver services leveraging Red Hat OpenShift. This will help AIB to sustain its high pace of digitalization and its strong focus on security and resilience.
Fergal Coburn, Group Chief Technology Officer, AIB, commented: “As we accelerate into the future of banking, we need the most advanced technology to underpin our ongoing digital transformation efforts. IBM technology has been the backbone of our service delivery for over 30 years and this agreement maintains our relationship in the innovation space. This will be a core contributor in ensuring that we achieve the key technology objectives that underpin our 2023 strategic ambitions and to meet the challenges faced in our industry.”
The IBM technology platform will further enhance AIB’s cyber resilience and fraud detection capabilities, ensuring its digital services remain highly performant, available, and secure for its customers.
The technology portfolio which includes data analytics and process automation tools provides market-leading capabilities, selected specifically to complement AIB’s existing technology roadmap and business requirements. It will also enable enhanced system availability capabilities which will support the bank’s approach to Operational Resilience.
Deborah Threadgold, Country General Manager, IBM Ireland said: “This agreement continues AIB’s successful strategy of being at the forefront of digital transformation in the Irish banking industry. The IBM z15 is a key part of the bank’s overall hybrid cloud strategy and will enable AIB to efficiently and securely manage traditional operations and provide AIB’s highly experienced team with the tools to deliver new digital services in a very agile manner.”
Graham Fagan, Group Director of Enterprise Technology & Cloud Engineering, AIB, commented “As financial organizations progress on their cloud journeys, they need an approach that allows various cloud-based applications to work in concert. Our hybrid cloud strategy is helping us to simplify our technological infrastructure so that we can move and manage data, services, and workflows across multiple clouds and on-premise platforms. The IBM products and services we are acquiring allow us to further extend that hybrid cloud ambition in an innovative, agile, secure and compliant manner.”
The agreement was signed in Q4 2021.
