PKO Bank Polski and the multi-app cloud platform
Deployment date: 2023
Sector: banking
Google Cloud
PKO Bank Polski needed a new IT environment for third-party business apps to be able to implement them faster, reduce maintenance costs, and scale them more easily as its business grows. The company decided to put the process of service management in the hands of OChK’s experts, who built a multi-app platform on Google Cloud and launched the first SaaS app with a technology partner. PKO Bank Polski now has an environment that allows it to quickly implement, update and streamline further business solutions, as well as reduce costs associated with infrastructure management.
About PKO Bank Polski
PKO Bank Polski is a leader in the Polish financial market with a history dating back to more than a century ago. The company has been consistently implementing its digital transformation strategy for more than a dozen years. Its services are already used by 12 million customers – both via remote channels (such as IKO mobile app and iPKO online banking) and in almost a thousand outlets across the country, whose employees use the apps to process customer orders.
Challenges
One of PKO Bank Polski’s priorities was to build a new and innovative IT environment for the apps that govern the processes within the services offered to potential and existing customers. The company’s urge to change was driven mainly by:
difficulties in scaling services and emerging technical debt – the existing infrastructure prevented the bank from using its services for other, similar business processes or adapting them to the current needs of the bank and its customers,
growing app maintenance costs – in order to keep the apps running, the bank incurred significant costs to maintain, use, and oversee the infrastructure.
Solution and implementation
Following consultations and analyses, the PKO Bank Polski and OChK teams decided to build a multi-app cloud platform that would operate in a subscription model and allow the launch of banking apps in the Software as a Service model. The decision was dictated by the need to find a solution that would address the bank’s key challenges while meeting high security requirements.
The multi-app cloud platform complements the landscape of on-premise banking systems. Its advantage is primarily the ability to quickly implement, develop and update applications, which helps to maintain a higher level of their availability and, as a result, operational continuity of the company's processes. The platform is based on Google Cloud, allowing access to app information (including vendors, security, and costs generated) from a single location. The entire infrastructure is managed by the OChK team, and the apps implemented on the platform are managed by their provider. This allows PKO Bank Polski to allocate extra funds and resources to the pursuit of its business goals.
The implementation of the project was taken care of by OChK’s engineers, whose competencies and experience in working for the banking sector were the undeniable assets. The tasks included:
confirming the viability of the requirements in a series of network experiments,
supporting the PKO Bank Polski team in updating the baseline technology stack to accelerate data migration to Google Cloud and in carrying out the entire process,
agreeing on the expected level of security and adaptation of the hardening of key components to the bank’s requirements, as well as supporting the team in notification of the solution to the Polish Financial Supervision Authority (PFSA),
supervising the adaptation of IDENTT, OChK's technology partner, services to the nature of the runtime environment of the multi-app platform and Google Cloud,
launching, in cooperation with the bank’s CERT team, the SOC as a Service, where the newly-built environment is monitored by OChK experts for security incidents on a 24/7 basis.
Cooperation
A partner in this project was IDENTT, provider of the IDENTT Vision solution for automated biometric verification of customer identity documents and images. IDENTT Vision is the first app migrated from the on-premise environment to the new platform. The partner’s team was responsible for implementing the necessary upgrades and customizing the solution to the specific needs of the end customer and the cloud environment provided. It has also expanded the scope of IDENTT Vision app functions, in particular reading and checking data from the electronic layer of a document, and increased the accuracy of the document OCR engine and the person image comparison module.
Technologies used
To carry out the project, the public Google Cloud was used, within which the following services were activated:
Anthos
Google Cloud Storage
Cloud SQL
Cloud Armor
Google Cloud Monitoring
Results
The bank gained access to a cloud solution that allows it to:
use more advanced security mechanisms for data and processes – the platform meets the regulatory requirements (i.e., PFSA Cloud Communication) and internal security requirements,
scale services while reducing costs associated with infrastructure management,
access the latest technology and full technical support from both Google and the local OChK team.
Immediately upon implementation, there was a 25% increase in the number of positive identity verifications and significant improvements in the following areas:
detecting similar faces – by 80%
face verification on a document – by 85%
MRZ validation (machine-readable zones on the document) – by 58%
correct document data reading – by 6%
verifying video recordings (i.e., liveness) – by 38%
The stabilization of the solution and implementation of streamlining activities by the business partner entirely eliminated customer attrition. Now, every process of verifying a potential customer, as long as they meet the necessary requirements, is consistently carried out to its proper conclusion, even under difficult technical conditions such as poor Internet coverage on the applicant's side or with increased traffic in electronic channels on the bank's side.
The launch of the multi-app platform enabled the OChK team to reconcile two worlds – managed cloud services on the one hand, and high security standards on the other, establishing a new way of sharing business apps from vendors (SaaS), which are characterized by high volatility and dynamic functional growth. The solution allows PKO Bank Polski to scale and optimize business and core services within Google Cloud with the highest level of timeliness, availability and support.
By implementing the project with OChK, we achieved two important goals. Rebuilding the architecture of the Remote Verification application has improved the business parameters of the solution, and migrating to the cloud gives us the ability to use this service extensively in future processes. The multiplication platform that has been built paves the way for us to deliver more services faster in the SaaS model.
Arkadiusz Malicki
Head of the Digital Initiatives and Projects Team, Digital Services Department, PKO Bank Polski
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