Red Hat Collaborates with PTSB to Help Fuel the Bank’s Digital Evolution

WHY THIS MATTERS:
Retail banks are under growing pressure to modernise legacy infrastructure while maintaining regulatory resilience and customer trust. PTSB’s adoption of Red Hat OpenShift as a cloud-native foundation signals a deliberate shift toward microservices, automation and hybrid cloud delivery to improve agility and operational efficiency. Early results — including a 284% improvement in infrastructure provisioning times and faster rollout of services like Digital Card Services and SEPA Instant Payments — demonstrate how platform standardisation can materially accelerate time to market.

For mid-sized banks in particular, modernisation is not just about cost control; it’s about enabling continuous delivery of digital features while strengthening resilience. By embedding automation, containerisation and repeatable deployment patterns, PTSB is aligning its technology stack with modern DevOps practices — reducing developer friction and improving scalability across digital channels.

Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced its collaboration with PTSB, one of Ireland’s leading retail banks, to implement a cloud-native modernisation programme. With Red Hat OpenShift, the initiative increased change agility, accelerated time to market for customer value and improved operating costs and efficiencies. PTSB has already launched new functionality on the platform including Digital Card Services and SEPA Instant Payments.  

PTSB is a leading provider of personal and business banking services in the Irish market. Its business strategy is focused on deepening customer relationships, diversifying income and differentiating customer experience through personalisation. In recognition of rapidly evolving customer needs and behaviours, the Bank invests in its digital, voice and in-person channels on a progressive basis to provide new and existing customers with more resilient, efficient and intuitive experiences.

PTSB chose to work with Red Hat, finding a strong alignment in company values, which include openness, innovation and collaboration. Through a Red Hat Open Innovation Labs residency, PTSB teams adopted Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes. The residency focussed on using microservices to support new functionality within the Bank’s mobile banking application. 

The collaboration has delivered a strong foundation for the future and enhanced the skills, processes, and confidence of the Bank’s teams. Consequently, PTSB selected Red Hat OpenShift for software delivery across key value streams within the organisation. This environment runs in concert with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for centralized management and relies on Red Hat Enterprise Linux to provide a more consistent and comprehensive foundation for its critical workloads. 

The Bank’s new Digital Card Services functionality was the first application to go live on Red Hat OpenShift, helping customers to self-manage card controls and blocking. Following this foundational work, PTSB identified that its new payments platform, which manages SEPA Instant Payments, would benefit from the same approach. Using Red Hat platforms enabled the bank to save considerable delivery time. Next, the Bank is seeking to migrate all existing microservices and a broad range of digital capabilities to Red Hat OpenShift to further enhance customer experience and operational resilience.

The new Red Hat-powered foundation is supporting PTSB in being more agile and resilient while providing a differentiated customer experience, including:  

• Enhanced customer experience through more compelling service, faster innovation, and resilience of the Bank’s digital channels. 
• Developer productivity improvements, reduced cognitive load and quicker onboarding.
• Faster modernisation by providing transparency and repeatable patterns for best practice. 
• Accelerated time to market for updates and new services with the help of greater automation. The Bank has seen a 284% improvement in infrastructure provisioning times via self-service. 
• Predictable delivery cadence and lead times enables better planning for the Bank.
• Business expansion with greater ease of integrating third-party as well as internally developed software thanks to a simplified delivery approach.
• Improved sustainability with the ability to scale up and down, only using services when they are needed.  
• Positive cultural impact, by taking a team-first approach and product mindset through adopting open practices and shifting testing and security practices left.
  

Supporting Quotes

Hans Roth, Senior Vice President & General Manager, EMEA, Red Hat 

“Red Hat is proud to support PTSB’s mission to unlock the cloud capability of its organisation through standardising on Red Hat platforms and simplifying the experience for its teams. PTSB is leading the way in differentiating its brand through delivering better software faster – whether that’s rolling out a new service or making iterations to its existing app. Red Hat OpenShift is able to scale with PTSB as it expands, helping the bank to improve reliability of services, reduce risk and focus more energies on innovation.”

Tom Hayes, Chief Technology Officer, PTSB 

“PTSB’s promise to be Altogether More Human means that we bring the best of technology and our people together to solve real customer needs and deliver a better banking experience. Our continued successful digital evolution relies on a foundation of efficient, resilient and flexible technology. Red Hat cloud-native platforms have played a key role in enhancing the agility and efficiency of our digital, voice and in-person channels, further enabling us to differentiate through exceptional customer experiences.”

Jason Barry, Head of Digital Enablement, PTSB

“The collaboration between Red Hat and PTSB has been productive from the start, thanks to a strong cultural alignment and a shared commitment to our Purpose and Ambition. Beyond engineering expertise, Red Hat has brought creativity and openness to facilitate our move to cloud-native methods and technologies. One of the greatest advantages of our new Red Hat-based platform and modern application development approach is we enable teams to self-solve problems if they arise, which ultimately manifests in greater customer value, faster.”

FF NEWS TAKE:
This is less about a vendor partnership and more about infrastructure repositioning. PTSB is building a cloud-native operating model designed to compete in a market where customer expectations evolve quickly and instant payments are table stakes.

The measurable gains in provisioning speed and developer productivity show that cloud modernisation is now delivering tangible ROI, not just strategic ambition. As more European banks seek to balance innovation with regulatory discipline, standardised Kubernetes-based platforms like OpenShift are increasingly becoming the backbone of digital transformation. The real differentiator will be how effectively banks translate that technical agility into sustained customer experience improvements.