Bank of Valletta Guarantee Highest Availability for Customer-Facing Services at Lowest Cost and Risk by Using a Pre-Integrated Infrastructure
 
 

Bank of Valletta Guarantee Highest Availability for Customer-Facing Services at Lowest Cost and Risk by Using a Pre-Integrated Infrastructure

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Bank of Valletta is a leading financial services provider in Malta, delivering a full range of financial services, including investment and private banking, fund management, and securities trading. The bank operates 41 branches, a corporate center, six business centers and a wealth management division. As Malta's oldest financial services provider and one of its largest, Bank of Valletta also operates offices in Australia, Libya, and Milan.

Bank of Valletta uses Oracle Database 11g as the foundation for its critical customer-facing and back-office systems. The bank benefits from third-party tools into which Oracle GoldenGate and Oracle Tuxedo are embedded to ensure continuous uptime and high performance for its online customer services. Oracle’s SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers and Oracle disk storage arrays further improve resource utilization and strengthen resilience and availability. The Oracle solutions help the bank to optimize hardware and software performance, reduce costs and risk, and streamline vendor management.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Bank of Valletta p.l.c.

  • “Oracle’s pre-integrated, best-in-class software and hardware underpins the maximum availability architecture that supports our goal of being one of Europe’s best-performing banks.” – Joseph Agius, Executive Head, Information Technology Bank of Valletta p.l.c.

  • Ensure continuous availability for the hundreds of thousands of customer transactions processed each day, ranging from branch and back-office transactions to standing orders, direct debits and credits, ATM cash withdrawals and deposits, point of sale transactions, and transactions via internet and cell phones, and the bank’s contact center
  • Restore customer service in minutes, should the bank’s core system production site go down
  • Maximize performance of retail banking solutions, including savings and deposit accounts as well as mortgages developed by Bank of Valletta using multiple heterogeneous technologies, and adapt retail banking applications rapidly and inexpensively in line with corporate and market requirements
  • Guarantee 24/7 uptime for Oracle Database on which the bank runs its e-commerce, risk management, investment, and payment-hub operations, as well as its business intelligence platform
  • Reduce IT cost of ownership and business risk while continually improving security, scalability, resilience, and fault tolerance across the entire hardware and software stack that supports the bank’s critical customer operations

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

Used Oracle GoldenGate, embedded in the BASE24 payment engine that authorizes and manages all card transactions processed by the bank, to replicate transaction data from the primary production site to a backup BASE24 machine located at a secondary site, five kilometers away
  • Benefited from Oracle GoldenGate’s hot backup capabilities to capture and replicate changes to live transaction logs in less than one minute while preserving the integrity of card holder and transaction data
  • Capitalized on the dynamic scalability of Oracle GoldenGate to enable customers to continue withdrawing cash, making card purchases, carrying out internet banking, and shopping online—even during busy times and peak periods, such as evenings, weekends, and prior to holidays
  • Deployed Oracle GoldenGate to ensure rapid recovery in the event of an outage of the primary core business application production site
  • Gained ability to restore customer access to all services within 20 minutes of failure
  • Extracted data from BASE24, daily, into an in-house developed data warehouse, running on Oracle Database 11g , to enable timely financial and market analysis and reporting
  • Used Oracle Tuxedo , embedded in the third-party tool used to develop the bank’s retail banking applications, to manage load balancing and ensure continuous availability of all customer-facing applications
  • Used Oracle Tuxedo to adjust processes and workflows as required to meet the changing needs of customers and comply with new regulatory requirements
  • Ran critical customer-facing applications, such as the bank’s e-commerce gateway and payments hub, plus essential back-office tasks including risk analysis and business intelligence, on four SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers to ensure 24/7 uptime
  • Benefited from bundled SPARC and Solaris solutions to optimize price performance and provide unmatched investment protection
  • Leveraged the scalability, bandwidth, and capacity utilization of Oracle disk storage to store more than 28,000 terabytes of transaction data from production and back-up systems and support more transactions in the same footprint to save on power, space, and cooling
  • Achieved greater than 99% service availability for the applications running on Oracle Database, and for the third-party applications into which Oracle GoldenGate and Oracle Tuxedo are embedded,
  • Benefited from maximum availability infrastructure built on Oracle software and hardware to achieve the highest performance at the lowest cost and risk and support goal of becoming one of the best performing banks in Europe

Why Oracle

“The combination of Oracle software and hardware reduces risk, increases system performance, and drives down costs by giving us pre-engineered hardware and software from a single vendor. Why change a winning formula?” said Joseph Agius, executive head, information technology, Bank of Valletta p.l.c.

Bank of Valletta purchased Oracle Database in 1998 for the unrivalled scalability and reliability it provides for the bank’s critical operations. The high performance of the third-party solutions into which Oracle GoldenGate and Oracle Tuxedo are embedded has strengthened Oracle’s position as a strategic technology supplier. 

Bank of Valletta implemented Sun hardware in 2001 when it upgraded from a mainframe environment. The bank benchmarked several leading hardware vendors and selected Sun for its computing power and ability to optimize space and power requirements and scale to growing application workloads. Sun’s storage solutions delivered affordability and business-ready functionality.

Bank of Valletta refreshes and modernizes its hardware and software platforms every five years. The bank always evaluates competitor products but Oracle’s solutions continue to provide best performance and value for money. The combined power of Oracle hardware and software ensures upward compatibility of each new generation of hardware and software and has reinforced the bank’s decision to build its future on the Oracle platform.