[Music] welcome back to red hat summit 2021 my name is dave vellante and you're watching the cube where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise of course virtually in this case and i'm pleased to welcome victor carumpus who is the senior vice president of digital banking at bank mandiri coming in from jakarta welcome to the cube victor great to see you hi dave great to see you and great to be invited here thank you yeah you're very welcome i i wonder if you could just give us an overview of the bank maybe talk a little bit about your strategy your customers you know what the what the focus is of your company and what your role is there okay uh maybe i'm i'll give a short overview about bang mandir itself so bang money is a state-owned enterprise owned by the government but we also public company currently we already have a very big distribution channel in so uh you know indonesia is an island country it's very huge country so we are we are representing all over indonesia from province of aceh and i'm up to profits of papua and we have about 2600 branches all over indonesia and about uh 15 000 atms all over indonesia so bangladesh itself is focused on a lot of segment customers like indonesia from the corporate side small medium enterprise and also retail banking now uh we are we are currently focused in turning ourselves to become having to have more digital capability and currently in our uh current situations actually it is very good uh about 95 percent of our transactions is already coming from the electronic channel so it's only about five percent that coming from the branches but we know that this is still a journey uh and we are building more digital capability and features and functions on our digital channels to our customer got it um okay and so your your your digital journey kind of coincides i guess in a way with your your your container uh adoption journey uh i think that started a few years ago um and so maybe you could talk a little bit about that i i mean in thinking about modernizing your application portfolio obviously containers been around forever but they weren't packaged in a way that could actually be easily you know utilized and now you're seeing people in i.t roles like yourself really leaning in maybe you could talk about some of the technology considerations that impacted that desire to actually leverage containers i think uh first it's about the scalability because with a monolithic architecture it's kind of difficult to scale up for only specific features by doing container microservices we have options to scale up in a very fast way because one of the features is auto scaling on the container architectures uh one monitor is a very focused on the transaction banking so you might say bangladesh is supporting the economy of the country because in a in any given time in bangladesh we we're running about four thousand transactions per seconds that's a huge transactions number and have having said that uh our channel like i told you already running about 95 percent of the transactions so scalability is always important for us because especially like like now is the the in indonesia is a festive month it's a ramadan month where muslim is actually doing fasting but at the same time actually there's a lot of needs and people do a lot of transactions and on this kind of festive seasons the transition can be increased up to 40 or 50 suddenly and that's kind of things always happen in bangladesh and we must be ready and we must have a scalability on demand now containerization is enabling us to do that other thing is about flexibility because on the old days actually when we want to set up a new environment it's very difficult and takes a lot of time and that's affecting the time to market our products by doing the containerizations and putting it on a ci cd continuous integration called the development plan platform we are we call devsecops platform that kind of things becoming automatic because we set up the devsecos platform and the third one is the consistency actually so by by doing the contact investigations we can put the the apis on our back-end apis in the container itself and actually it's deliverable environment and a consistent experience to our customer because for example we promise our customer that every transaction should be finished within two seconds from their mobile banking up to our hosts and back forward to their mobile banking is only two seconds so that kind of thing is driving us to move to the current technology which we're using containerization and micro services great okay so 4 000 transactions per second you can't can't do that on erc20 ethereum for all you crypto fans out there that's that's pretty high volume uh and if i understand it correctly victor your role is really to envision this digital environment and then ultimately make it happen from a technology standpoint is that correct that's product that's got it yeah so okay so you now have a number of of product lines and teams you're using the same container platform maybe you could share with our audience some of the best practices and learnings that that you've taken away on this journey so i think first of all we can reuse a lot of components by doing this containerization platform is different when we still use the monolithic platform like the application server of java application server uh by using containerization actually uh be providing like a service banking as a service so whenever we build a new channel for example the first one we built a new service for example like a fun transfer service but when we create another channel for example a corporate banking electronic channel or we create another uh let's say wealth management channel whatever we already built before can be reusable instantly by using this technology so uh if i might say that actually there is a lot of best practices coming by using this platform and my team get a lot of benefit in terms of faster development time and also they can deliver the product and service in a high quality manner minimize the number of errors as well you know there's a lot of choices out there obviously i wonder if you could share what led you to the choice of red hat and open shift okay so first of all before we choose the platform actually we also comparing ourselves with the with the fintechs and also with the big tech in indonesia as well so we see we see that actually they already start using kubernetes and uh their platform is quite stable and even they can support about 90 to 100 million of customers without any issues at all so when we see this uh we choose a lot of we learn about a lot of platform and we finally choose opencv because we think that openshift and we we already do our research openshift is quite stable and for banks like us that have for having 4500 transaction per seconds stability is number one uh availability is also number one now uh having said that after doing our research we choose openshift and we implemented openshift in our environment because we promise our customers to provide 99.95 percent uh availability can i just i'm sorry to interrupt you victor can you just repeat that you cut out a little bit so you you said you you promised your customers to deliver and then you cut out a little bit can you just repeat what you just said there okay so we're giving a promise to our to our customer providing a 99.95 availability so this is the starting point of our channel sure in the efficiency we have efficient also to providing four nines which is 99.99 but i mean the starting point is 99.95 and because we have that the demand that requirement that's one of the reason we choose the openshift and red hat as our technology stack platform got it okay and so i have a question um what was it like in terms of just the skills and the adoption uh for your developers uh was it was it a big gap to go from where you were to you know where you are today did you have to what kind of training did you have to do did you have to do any sort of outsourcing to accelerate that maybe you could describe that how you close that skills gap so definitely in the beginning is quite challenging because although they are using modern languages like jaffa or kotlin but uh to understand the concept and to design correctly yes we we did a lot of training to them uh it takes a it takes me about three months to give them the proper training uh in terms of building the right uh microservices platform and also to building modular architecture in terms of the customer channel because this will be the fundamental when you build it correctly in the beginning and actually at the later point you will enjoy the benefit so the first three months actually is training and doing research and development and doing a lot of trial and errors but after the three months actually we already have the right technology stack have the right models and our devsecops is already working then actually after that the speed is very fast because uh it sprints uh we do agile way of working the agiles dlc it's only one month so every one month we already have new features coming in so that's what we call a huge transformation a digital transformation inside of our bank it's three months actually not bad i mean i would i would have thought on average it's going to take five or six months to get people up to speed so three months is pretty good and i'm also inferring that you weren't just paving the cow path you weren't just saying okay let's take our traditional and then you know re refactor it to digital you had to re-envision what digital looked like because the digital is different uh than the traditional uh so so that's actually pretty good uh ramp rate i wonder if you could just go ahead and comment if you could because when you say about uh revamp so actually it's not on the id side not only but also the business side we implement new way as well so actually if clearly they're implementing a new model so they're using a design thinking and also a co-creation model where now when we building a product so we're not writing the old product in a new way no we totally building it from from scratch and involving our key customer and our stakeholder when we're building this product so actually we implementing new models what we call design thinking and also uh co-creation with our customer so that's actually changing the face of the customer electronic channel a lot and and actually when we when we want to to deploy we invite our customer to test it first we call it like usability testing if they like it we continue to design if they they don't like it they give us a feedback how they would like it to be changed and and that's we appreciate our customer feedback because customers experience is everything now yeah so so the product can be accepted if the experience on that product is really making customer uh solving their problem solving the customer problem and making them enjoying uh doing transactions in our mobile banking product i think this is a really important point for people to understand so you weren't just paving the cow path i call it you're taking the old and and just trying to refactor it and make it exactly turn it into digital you had to really think about the business the business processes the dependencies the customer experience and then bring it back um what have been some of the business outcomes of this initiative and maybe you could we then after that we can get into some of the the future plans so so the outcome uh i think this journey uh since last year uh not last year actually since no october 2019 we already started the journey uh what took us by surprise is actually the pandemic uh suddenly the first three months when we have the pandemic of coffee we are being forced to close a lot of branches for temporary because we want to avoid the pandemic situations and that time actually the the demand using our digital channel is increasing a lot but because we already prepared actually we get the benefit one of the thing is uh the business benefit is relating so during the pandemic nobody can come to the branch and mostly the account opening actually happening online so uh we even got about 9000 account opening per day which is something that we are not imagining before so uh the benefit is very clear by using this this technology actually enabling us to provide digital capability for our customer and enabling us to open more accounts we see ourselves can grow even not linear but exponentially grow by using this platform uh talking about that indonesia is a is a huge country with we have about 200 250 million populations and actually there's still a lot of people is not having a bank account at all now by doing this actually we open opportunity doing financial inclusion for those people that need a banking account now they can reach us by using the digital platform as well yeah that's an awesome story and it goes back to the to the reason the real motivator for for moving to kubernetes and containers was scale uh and and you know it's you obviously started your digital journey prior to the pandemic but a lot of customers and i'm sure you as well were were forced to speed up a portion anyway of the digital component uh because of the pandemic like you said you couldn't people couldn't walk into the branches so but now you've got some more time to think about that journey you've had a lot of learnings 2020 was like a petri dish of experimentation but but in real time having to serve customers what's the future look like for the bank's technology journey okay so basically we uh we are not stopping only on the retail side yeah uh we want to redefine our customer journey also on the wholesale side and also on the small medium enterprise there is still a lot of things that need to be done uh and required by the customer actually so uh on the on the on the sme side we want to give them easier access uh for uh financing their businesses i think when we are back to the new normal uh the business need to have funding for for starting their business again so building an sme platform for them will will help a lot and will help the country as well on the retail side actually like i told you uh we are focusing on the more financial inclusion because uh i give you example right uh from the 230 million of indonesians uh populations i think by today maybe it's only about 50 million customers that already have a banking account so there is still a lot of people that need an access faster and cheaper and more efficient way for doing banking transactions so that's this also will become our focus and the last part is actually corporate what we see now a lot of the corporate require us to open uh api connectivity doing open banking with them the government actually the central bank supporting it supporting all the banks they are trying to create an api playbooks now and then they create they want to create an api standard for all the core all the use corporate also can connect it to the bank directly using api so this is also our focus because it will help the country economy when the economy costs the transaction costs getting more efficient getting more cheaper and there's a lot of transaction can be supported by our bank as well so i think i think that's the the future that we are imagining and i'm really hope that the pandemi will be finished and we come back to the to the new normal and we can support more transactions for this country yeah you're here to that i call it the new abnormal but so this is this is a great story everybody loves to talk about disruption we do as well and but people think oh it's out with out with the old in with the new and it's not like that this is a great story victor of uh of an established incumbent that is modernizing its its applications and its digital experience and of course the incumbent has the advantage of it's a real business it has customers that has a data it has experiences it and if it can modernize its infrastructure and and it's in its application portfolio it actually has an advantage because it's got way more features way more data way more customers and more resources so victor thanks so much for coming on thecube i really appreciate you sharing your story thank you dave thank you for inviting me thank you that was our pleasure and thank you for watching red hat summit 21 this is thecube you