Bendigo and Adelaide Bank has moved a significant step forward in its goal of shifting half its applications to public cloud by 2024, with the bank revealing it has rebuilt its entire digital banking system on Google Cloud, its longstanding cloud partner.
Australia’s seventh biggest retail bank has revealed it had moved its entire digital banking application stack to Google Cloud in May this year. As a result, Bendigo now shares the same public cloud-backed infrastructure as its digital-only banking subsidiary Up.
According to the bank, the migration has delivered a substantial performance boost for its customer-facing digital banking application, “slashing deployment times for customer experience upgrades to just 15 minutes”. As well, it said, Bendigo has achieved 99.9 per cent availability across its underlying cloud infrastructure.
“As the most trusted bank, this milestone is a critical enabler in helping Bendigo and Adelaide Bank deliver a better digital banking experience and meet growing customer preferences to interact with us digitally,” said Andrew Cresp, Bendigo’s chief information officer.
“With this foundational work with Google Cloud now complete, we’re able to respond to customer needs faster,” Cresp added.
Bendigo said it has now migrated around one-third of its applications to public cloud.
Migration to cloud would “[pave] the way for a more robust and personalised customer experience and faster, more reliable rollout of new features,” the bank said in response to the migration of its digital banking app, adding that it is a “key component of its wider transformation program to drive simplification, modernisation, and consolidation through streamlined service offerings”.
Leveraging Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), the cloud provider’s dedicated infrastructure management platform, Bendigo said it will now be able to dynamically scale its workloads up or down depending on business requirements. In off-peak periods, workloads can be scaled down to drive decreases in costs and the business’s environmental footprint, it said; in high-demand periods, workloads can be scaled up to meet increased demand on systems. This, it added, would help its developers and engineers reduce the time from ideation to production and deliver greater reliability and confidence for customers.
As part of the bank’s latest expansion of its Google relationship, Bendigo said it would also leverage the bigtech’s enterprise data warehouse BigQuery and its AI platform Vertex AI, a suite of MLOps tools for engineers and data scientists, to its recently released open data ‘lakehouse’. This, it said, would help to simplify its customer data management, enabling greater customisation and personalisation for customers.
The migration was supported by implementation partner, Cognizant, with Bendigo noting that the pair had met compliance requirements for moving highly sensitive data to the cloud.
The deployment was delivered within a “narrow, six-hour implementation window”, the bank said, supported by thousands of hours of preparation by Bendigo and Adelaide Bank employees and support and training from Google Cloud’s Learning and Enablement team.
Google Cloud is a core partner in Bendigo’s multi-year transformation strategy, with workloads run out of Google’s 2021-launched Melbourne cloud region.
Bendigo and Adelaide Bank maintains a staff of more than 7,000, with upwards of 2.4 million customers.
