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French banking group BNP Paribas and IBM have inked a fresh 10-year cloud deal.
BNP Paribas has extended its existing cloud agreement with IBM in order to boost the bank’s resilience and redundancy, providing “uninterrupted continuity” for its financial services, as well as protect customer data, IBM said.
The move follows the passing of the Digital Operational Resilience Act regulation by the European Union, which mandates a series of technical standards for risk management. The regulations, which financial services companies and third-part suppliers have to meet, came into effect from January this year.
IBM has been supplying BNP Paribas with cloud services since 2019. For the past five years, BNP Paribas has been running IBM cloud in its data centres; in 2028, the company will build a new area for Big Blue’s cloud services in its data centres.
BNP Paribas is Europe’s second largest bank, with annual revenues of nearly €50 billion, around 178,000 employees globally, and operations in 64 countries worldwide.
Last month, the bank appointed a new chief information officer (CIO), Marc Camus. Camus succeeded former incumbent Bernard Gavgani, who had been head of IT operations at the company since 2018.
Camus was formerly the CIO of BNP Paribas Fortis, a Belgium-based subsidiary of the bank, having worked in various positions in the banking service group since 1996.
According to the bank, Camus’ role will cover improving operational efficiency, rolling out AI and cloud technologies to “enhance the customer experience” as well as managing banking systems security.
Technology is one of BNP Paribas’ three strategic pillars for 2025, alongside growth and sustainability.
Its technology strategy is underpinned by a number of goals for its IT estate, including stepping up its use of AI, data and robotics; using more pooled service centres; streamlining the number of platforms in use across its European businesses; more use of cloud tech; and greater “APIsation” of its IT.
The IBM deal will feed into the bank’s IT goals for 2025: using its GPUs on IBM Cloud, alongside the bank’s own cloud infrastructure, will help the bank towards its aim of having 1,000 AI use cases in production this year.
The bank is also using Red Hat OpenShift, IBM’s Kubernetes container management platform, in its application development, to build more modular and portable apps that can be used across its estate.
