MONETA streamlines banking operations with Exadata Cloud@Customer

With almost 1.5 million clients and a network of 160 branches, MONETA bank is the fourth-largest financial institution in the Czech Republic. The bank operates both in retail, where it provides residential customers a diverse offering of financial services, and in the commercial segment, where it focuses primarily on small businesses, including independent professionals.

As an integral part of its IT infrastructure strategy, MONETA deployed two Exadata Quarter Racks on its premises in 2016, supplementing the installation in 2021 with the acquisition of two more Exadata Quarter Racks. However, given the bank’s rapid growth, the need for more storage and database resources arose just one year later. The bank had to decide whether to acquire another on-premises database or gradually move to the cloud.

A crucial challenge the bank faced was keeping low latency between its database engine, used to write information in the database, and its applications. To avoid high latency, MONETA’s Operational Data Store had to be situated as close as possible to the internet and branch applications, which ruled out a full migration to Oracle Public Cloud.

Because mergers with other financial institutions were on the horizon, the bank needed enhanced database flexibility to support critical banking applications to manage the influx of new customers and associated data.

Building on its longtime relationship with Oracle, the bank increased operational flexibility, storage capabilities, and data warehouse performance by choosing Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer. The solution also ensured low latency between 300-plus Oracle Database instances and the bank’s applications, eliminating tasks related to managing an expanded on-premises infrastructure.

“All our critical workloads are running on Oracle Database. There’s a high presence of Oracle in MONETA, and we are very happy with the quality and performance of Oracle solutions,” says Jakub Valenta, director of data and IT infrastructure.

After adopting Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer to scale its infrastructure and support its growth strategy, the bank’s in-house IT team could operate the 300-plus Oracle Database instances much more efficiently. Thanks to Oracle Multitenant—which enables an Oracle Database to function as multiple pluggable and self-contained databases to improve resource utilization, database management, and overall data security—the team can manage all databases as a single unit, enhancing flexibility regarding task management and reducing manual database operations by up to 80%.

Deploying Exadata Cloud@Customer offers MONETA a high degree of flexibility because of its ability to provision new environments much faster, without the need to increase its on-premises footprint. “We have much room to grow, and we’re benefiting from a solution that allows us to consider various options in the future, such as upgrading our core operating system or deploying additional test environments to bring new applications to market,” says Valenta.

A critical benefit of Exadata Cloud@Customer is the end-to-end, always-on encryption of all data stored and operated by the bank, backed up with customer-owned encryption keys. Exadata Cloud@Customer enables MONETA to easily comply with the Czech Republic’s data residency regulations by operating the machine behind the bank’s own firewalls.

By moving to Exadata Cloud@Customer, tasks such as maintenance and infrastructure patching shifted entirely from the hands of the in-house IT team to Oracle. The effort involved in performing frequent administrative assignments decreased substantially, freeing internal resources to focus on other essential tasks.