Absa Bank Kenya has announced a new partnership with Huawei on a SD-WAN Solution to build a new digital foundation for branch networks.
To meet the digital transformation requirements, Huawei and Absa Bank Kenya’s technical team conducted in-depth discussions and surveys.
Based on the bank’s actual requirements and digital strategy, as well as Huawei’s strong technical reserves and construction experience in enterprise network and financial digital transformation, Huawei provided Absa Bank Kenya with a customized NCE-Campus-based SD-WAN solution.
In addition to common SD-WAN capabilities, this solution comes with some other unique advantages including:
As business continues to expand, Absa Bank Kenya is actively seeking the most appropriate network infrastructure.
“We strive to offer our customers a seamless digital experience. We want to enable them to bank and transact without any hitch and in a seamless manner at the convenience of whatever they could be,” said Moses Okundi, CIO of Absa Bank Kenya.
To realize that, the bank needed to build a new infrastructure to improve the efficiency of various banking services, reduce O&M costs, and enhance user experience at branches.
Intelligent application routing ensures user experience for key applications:
Application-level intelligent traffic steering + 5G plus Fiber on-demand scheduling + A-FEC enable 20% video packet loss without frame freezing and artifacts.
Supporting multiple ZTP modes including emails, USB flash drive, etc. Network deployment at branches can be performed within minutes.
Branch, device, application and link status are all visualized.Capable of centralized management and simplified O&M.
Finally, Absa Bank Kenya also selected Huawei as its digital transformation partner to build a cloud-based network between its headquarters and branches. This is prove that Absa Bank Kenya highly recognizes Huawei’s SD-WAN solution to meet its service expansion and digital innovation requirements during its digital upgrade.
Accelerating the Digital Transformation of Absa Bank Kenya
“We got to a point where we can manage traffic and distribute traffic evenly across various technology options or various connectivity options from various connectivity providers. The value of this is that it gives us robust resilience in managing that connectivity,” adds Okundi.
Indeed, in the future, the branch network of Absa Bank Kenya will have intelligent traffic steering capability. It means the network can dynamically select MPLS links or internet links based on application quality and MPLS link quality, to ensure that key services use links with good quality.
In addition, based on Huawei’s exclusive algorithm support, even if the quality of internet link is not so good, communication quality can still be ensured, which means that MPLS has a cost-effective alternative.
Huawei provides the iMaster NCE-Campus O&M platform for Absa Kenya, which can display the key O&M quality of devices, applications, and traffic. This platform can visualize application traffic of all branches, and therefore allows the IT team to monitor the dynamic data and adjust the bandwidth of each branch in a timely manner.
This brings efficient and intelligent operations, as Okundi explains, “For my tech team, we now have a very good level of visibility regarding the usage of the connectivity partners we have engaged. We are able to see where the usage is and how the traffic is distributed. And in the worst-case scenario where manual intervention is required, our team can pinpoint the challenges, making their intervention very accurate and efficient.”
These are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the benefits provided by SD-WAN. Absa Bank Kenya’s intelligent cloud-based branch network will serve as a critical foundation for the financial giant’s digital transformation.
As Okundi expounds: “I see it as a Lego blocks where the bottom layer is a strong technology foundation that gives us a platform to really offer cutting-edge digital solutions to our customers. And right at the bottom layer is a strong connectivity.”
In the future, branch network will further promote the intelligent upgrade of Absa Bank and eventually help them evolve into intelligent customer experience centers. This digital foundation will continue to support the business expansion and innovation of Absa Bank Kenya to provide the most advanced and the best financial services to Kenya’s customers and enterprises.
By Staff Writer.
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