Fibabanka improves time to market and customer satisfaction with Oracle Cloud

Fibabanka is one of the fastest-growing banks in Turkey, offering a portfolio of custom applications that provide private, mobile, internet, and phone banking services. Its leadership instills the mindset that Fibabanka is a technology company with a banking license. But even though the company thrives on innovation, its technical staff couldn’t adopt modern cloud technologies due to the country’s Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency (BRSA) restrictions on data storage and transfer.

As a result, technical staff built and maintained a complex on-premises infrastructure that spanned multiple databases and host environments. At least half the team’s time was spent on maintenance activities. Compliance updates, system patches, and other tasks across unconsolidated databases were tedious and time-consuming. The bank experiences variable transaction demand, often associated with volatility in financial markets. But its inelastic and disparate infrastructure could not be easily scaled to fluctuations. And because financial institutions are popular targets for cyberattacks, IT staffers vigilantly monitored systems for threats.

Meanwhile, rapid business growth caused a dramatic increase in transaction and database volumes, placing a greater burden on IT staff. Employees routinely worked long hours and over weekends to keep up, which negatively impacted morale and work-life balance overall. And, as the business grew and the labor market tightened, Fibabanka started to recognize the potential for critical gaps in technical skills.

Scaling with additional hardware required long hours and Herculean efforts. Meanwhile, Fibabanka’s leadership was constantly aware that any disruption in system availability or breaches of security could have a catastrophic impact on the business and on customer satisfaction.

Fibabanka’s leadership evaluated the limited options available domestically for leveraging the simplicity and economics of cloud computing. It also sought a solution that would meet data residency requirements to remain compliant with BSRA. The company realized that Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer would combine the performance of Oracle Exadata with the flexibility and affordability of a managed database service delivered in a customer data center.

Because the bank was an Oracle on-premises database customer for years, it was confident that Oracle could provide the resources and expertise to efficiently migrate its databases to the cloud in a manner that would not disrupt core banking operations. And Oracle was the best choice for providing long-term managed services that would free up internal staff, while also alleviating ongoing concerns related to IT staff skill gaps.

Fibabanka became the first financial institution to migrate to Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer in Turkey. IT infrastructure and database license costs dropped by 40% after the bank consolidated all databases in a single Exadata environment. The single environment shares precious resources such as CPU, which improved the use of licensing costs, reduced energy costs, and avoided further sprawl.

Immediately after go-live, the burden of maintaining multiple databases was lifted from technical staff. The Oracle managed services team is now responsible for all database management, including periodic patching, on one consolidated Exadata Cloud@Customer instance. Fibabanka’s technical team now proactively focuses on how to optimize IT spend, as well as ways to improve the customer experience. For example, It staff can now anticipate demand and set the number of CPUs dynamically based on expected workloads associated with market fluctuations.

With Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer, Fibabanka no longer experiences the frustration, time commitment, and capital expenditures associated with purchasing and installing new hardware in its data centers. IT staffers regained 50% of their bandwidth, applying that time to higher-value initiatives such as improving banking services applications and customer satisfaction. Fibabanka’s leadership attributes that increase to reallocating IT staff to focus on delivering solutions to market faster, along with the performance, stability, and security of Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer.