Nutanix & Ashur International Bank to fuel digital banking in Iraq

By Delisha Fernandes

Nutanix, a hybrid multicloud computing provider, has announced that Iraqi financial institution, Ashur International Bank has deployed IT infrastructure from the vendor that sets the foundation for digital banking innovation in the country.

With the demand for digital banking in Iraq, Ashur International Bank was committed to its mission of leveraging the latest global technological developments to serve the best interests of its customers. However, the Bank’s legacy infrastructure – with its complex network of point-to-point integrations between systems – was a barrier to these ambitions. Keen to shift towards the more efficient, effective, and secure approach of using microservices, APIs and containerized applications, the bank sought to revamp its underlying infrastructure.

Guided by the expertise of its local technology partner, Ashur International Bank’s IT team identified Red Hat OpenShift as the enterprise Kubernetes container platform of choice. Due to regulatory constraints, the bank could not leverage the public cloud hosted version of this solution and so decided to build its own private cloud, which led it to Red hat OpenShift on Nutanix.

“When you talk private cloud, there’s really only one company you should partner with. Nutanix is simply brilliant and with incredibly strong references from our peers in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Jordan for not just their technology, but the associated local expertise and support we knew they were the right choice,” said Bashar Al-otaibi, Head of Digital Transformation at Ashur International Bank. “With their jointly-validated design, Nutanix and Red Hat were able to demonstrate the value of Openshift as an enterprise-grade Kubernetes platform for mission-critical applications. This gave us the level of confidence needed as a bank to proceed with this design.”

The IT team is currently in the process of developing a new Smart Payments module – the first of its kind in Iraq. Combining voice biometrics and Natural Language Processing (NLP) chatbots, the bank will empower customers to be rapidly authenticated and then intuitively make transactions by simply conversing with an automated virtual teller.