Siam Commercial Bank (SCB) is modernising its core banking by running it on IBM zSystems mainframe hardware.
The bank also said it had “adopted IBM z/OS Connect to enable RESTFul APIs in its core banking applications on IBM zSystems.”
Chief information officer Dharittee Kritsernvong said in a statement that SCB needed to continuously invest in having “sophisticated technology underneath” the myriad channels that customers now interacted with the bank: whether ATM, in-store terminals, online or mobile banking.
"As we have grown our online and mobile customer base exponentially and more and more customers are choosing to manage their finances, renew their car insurance or ask for home loans via digital channels, we put our customers at the centre and decided to bring access to the latest data on IBM zSystems via any device to our customer-facing team, to make it more convenient to serve our customers on the go, within the regulatory guidelines,” Kritsernvong said.
The bank said the mainframe modernisation would help SCB “to protect millions of dollars of investment on its existing platform, while also decreasing the time needed for development and deployment, increasing the reusability, improving the scalability, speeding the response time and simplifying the integration of its core IT infrastructure".
The ability to surface data held on the mainframe via APIs would also allow SCB “to provide innovative customer-centric and personalised products and services to millions of its customers across Thailand, with customer information directly queried from privacy-protected and regulatory-compliant data on IBM zSystems,” it added.