Nationwide development platform uses Red Hat technology

Nationwide Building Society is using Red Hat as part of its application development platform, which is speeding up software releases and improving availability.

The UK finance giant is using Red Hat OpenShift as part of a platform to integrate business systems after the success of an initial project to collect real-time data.

The project, known as Speed Layer, also uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and was able to manage over 100,000 data items per second. This meant data was made available to Nationwide’s Banking App faster.

Following the success of the Speed Layer project, Nationwide decided to increase integration across its business, through its Business Integration Platform (BIP).

The building society said it wanted an “event-driven integration platform that could better manage its system architecture, scale responsively when needed and bridge to modern cloud-native applications”.

Nationwide worked with Red Hat’s consulting arm to plan and build its BIP on Red Hat OpenShift. It takes advantage of open source technologies such as Kafka for distributed event storage and stream processing, and MongoDB for database management to help support ongoing service access during outages.

Through BIP, Nationwide has been able to process 100 million calls daily, including 14 million external queries, and support one-time password authentication, SAP systems and other functions. It has been able to maintain 99.999% service availability rates, increase processing times and apply upgrades quicker.  

BIP deployments use Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud and on-premise Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and there are plans for further migration of workloads to the cloud in the next 12 months. During the same period, Nationwide’s team of 50 people working on the BIP plan to automate more workflows and scale the platform to support every function across the organisation.

Nationwide’s head of BIP, Grant Valentine, said the building society must be prepared to meet unknown demands for digital services.

“As digital requirements continue to evolve, whether volume of payments, banking app users, regulation, or system scalability, we have to be prepared for as-yet unknown demands and channels,” he said. “Our Business Integration Platform powers many of our strategic initiatives, and running it on Red Hat OpenShift gives us hybrid cloud choice, robust performance and business agility so we can provide a faster and more convenient experience for our members.”

When most financial services firms were slashing spending due to the global financial crash of 2008, Nationwide was investing heavily in IT. It embarked on a £1bn project to transform its technology, following years of under-investment. This created the foundations for the company to adopt the latest technology when it emerges.

Today, it’s using fintech to transform the business. For example, one current major project has seen it begin to move all of its payments onto a cloud-based platform in what it described as “generational tech transformation”.