IT Infrastructure Services

Our customer is one of the largest banks in one of the East African countries with over a 150 branches across the whole region providing banking services to individuals, small to medium sized corporate clients, as well as large businesses and government revenue collection.

The bank was expanding rapidly geographically and in its client base size, all in accordance to its corporate strategy. The growth rate was rendering the existing IT systems obsolete in terms of performance and supporting the new features required by the customers such as branch-less banking and multi-channel interaction.

In order to drive efficiency and lower operational costs, the bank was keen on moving its customers from its banking hall queues to mobile banking and online banking platform. In addition, the bank had to ensure that its customers could get support at any time through any device and through the most convenient channel.

Onelife consultants Ltd partnered with a local IT firm and Cisco systems (CSCO NASDAQ) to provide network, collaboration, datacentre and security Infrastructure solutions covering the banks new HQ and its country wide branches. The Network included a highly available Local area network (LAN) for the HQ, LAN for each of the branches and a Wide Area Network (WAN) routing solution interconnecting the branches; this ensured end-to-end interconnectivity as a foundation for deploying customer facing services.  Onelife further designed a redundant, future proof Datacentre network solution supporting technologies such as ACI and unified Fabric to ensure fast, secure and predictable banking applications access by the staff and the customers. For a bank, security is always a top and first priority and as such, Onelife took a defense in-depth approach to ensure security in all layers of the network; this included WAN edge, Internet edge, WAN edge, partners edge security, LAN security and datacentre applications security. In order to drive collaboration and customer interaction, Onelife rollout full Cisco unified communications solution from voice and video communication, unified messaging, Instant messaging and presence (IM &P) to a full a multi-channel contact centre for enabling linking the bank with its customers.

In addition to Cisco systems, some of the other Vendor solutions include: radware load balancers, F5 application security appliances, Palo Alto UTMs and Fortinet UTMs

• The bank is now able to serve its customers more efficiently and hence more customer delight and loyalty.
• Reduced operational costs as the infrastructure now supports mobile and online banking. In addition there are direct communication costs savings as calls between branches are now via the Wide Area network rather than through the local Telco.
• Faster issues resolutions through video collaboration between branch staff and HQ. This used to necessitate face-to-face meetings.
• The business is now more agile and set for even more growth.