BNP Paribas Signs an Agreement with IBM Services to further deploy its Cloud Strategy

Banks are faced with changing consumer behaviors and expectations, in areas such as real-time banking, mobile services and access to a more complete view of their financial situation. To address customers’ expectations, BNP Paribas has engaged a transformation plan aiming at accelerating its digital transformation and improving the group’s operational efficiency.

To address these market changes, BNP Paribas and IBM Services today announced they are extending their partnership for eight years. This partnership further extends the two companies’ creation of the IT services company BNP Paribas Partners for Innovation (BP2I) – a joint venture held equally by BNP Paribas and IBM (NYSE: IBM) since 2003. This agreement will enable BNP Paribas to continue to deploy its cloud approach with service from IBM.

BNP Paribas, which developed its first private cloud in 2013, will now integrate the IBM Cloud hosted in data centers dedicated to the bank. BNP Paribas will also strengthen its hybrid cloud “as a service” capabilities, using IBM solutions offered via its public cloud to support the development of new services, including test and applications environments.

In line with its Cloud strategy and in order to ensure the security of its customers’ data,
BNP Paribas will not use the public cloud for either customer data or production environments with sensitive information.

Thanks to the expertise from IBM, this new step in the bank’s cloud approach will enable BNP Paribas to gain agility, ensure the performance of its IT systems and ensure security. It is also designed to improve the “Time to Market” for new digital applications and services and the privileged access of BNP Paribas to new technologies.

This agreement will also enable BNP Paribas to use IBM Hybrid Cloud solutions to increase its services capabilities through the usage of multiple environments, such as dedicated, public and private clouds, ensuring integration between these different environments. It will help enable the bank’s ability to improve the integration and optimize the workload management between these various Cloud infrastructure services.

The new banking services and technologies developed by BNP Paribas through IBM solutions will contribute to the acceleration of the digitization of the bank, the improvement of the services offered to its customers, and the support of the development of new digital applications.