Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC), the second largest financial services group in Southeast Asia, is building on a modern data foundation to deliver resilient and scalable services to customers.
The bank said it has been on the lookout for innovative solutions to achieve this, and collaborating with industry partners like Yugabyte to evolve its technology landscape.
OCBC’s head of data architecture, Wei Ming Lim told the Distributed SQL Summit Asia 2024 that the bank looked for a distributed relational database to address a distributed workload scenario for building scalable services to customers.
“There were several factors that led us to decide on YugabyteDB from building POC (proof of concept), to deployment,” he added.
Wei Ming said YugabyteDB can distribute workloads across nodes to ensure built-in high availability and scalability. Its PostgreSQL and Cassandra APIs also facilitated easier migration and developer adoption, and the database compared favourably to its peers.
Personalisation
The bank and its subsidiaries offer various services including commercial banking, specialist financial and wealth management services, ranging from consumer, corporate, investment, private and transaction banking to treasury, insurance, asset management and stockbroking services.
YugabyteDB enables real-time data personalisation, which is crucial for delivering personalised services.
Wei Ming said OCBC wanted a “proactive” kind of personalisation with the ability to have a millisecond response time, especially for banking apps and other use cases like credit card fraud blocking.
“We deployed Yugabyte to be able to support that real-time data personalisation kind of initiatives, to enhance our services for customers,” he added.
Wei Ming said adoption of any technology needs upskilling of the workforce and OCBC focussed on “continuous” education to encourage the teams to leverage the resources and make full use of a distributed database.
The technology team at OCBC plans to continue identifying key trends and seek innovative solutions by tapping on newer technologies like blockchain, augmented reality and virtual reality in future.
