Creating customer-focused banking services

Gospodarczy Bank Spółdzielczy w Barlinku (GBSBank), a co-operative bank in Poland, is rising to that challenge. The bank is looking to build on a 75-year history of innovation to delight existing customers and entice new prospects.

Roland Węgrzynowski, Director of the Technology team at Gospodarczy Bank Spółdzielczy w Barlinku, explains, “We are not an ordinary bank. Our priority is developing close personal relationships with our customers. And we don’t shy away from harnessing the latest technology to enhance our offering. For example, in 1998 we were one of the first banks in Poland to introduce a payment card featuring a microchip, beating Visa and Mastercard to the Polish market.”

As part of its program of continual improvement, GBSBank is adopting a new approach to interacting with customers and prospects. The bank will encourage them to submit queries electronically, through its website and email forms. It will then direct each query to the right specialist on staff, who can provide a tailored response.

“Our strategy is to optimize the customer experience and increase opportunities for up-selling and cross-selling by connecting people with our in-house experts,” says Węgrzynowski. “But this new approach required greater dependence on technology, which put added pressure on our existing IT infrastructure. It was vital that we enable consistent, rapid access to data and non-stop availability in the face of higher demand.”

GBSBank decided the time was right for a refresh of the storage platform supporting its Oracle databases and virtualized systems. The bank targeted higher performance, resilience and scalability. Węgrzynowski adds, “We’re anticipating huge data growth, driven by our modernization efforts and digitalization of paper-based processes. We wanted to be prepared and take our time over any changes to ensure that our customers were insulated from disruption.”

To enable its customer-focused strategy, GBSBank deployed IBM® FlashSystem® 5200 storage, as recommended by IBM Business Partner 4Prime.

“Our decision ultimately came down to trust,” explains Węgrzynowski. “We’ve been working with both IBM and 4Prime for more than a decade now. The team from 4Prime has played an important role in building our IT infrastructure and has consistently delivered a very high level of service and support. We also have first-hand experience of the reliability of IBM hardware, and we felt confident choosing IBM once again.”

GBSBank introduced two IBM FlashSystem 5200 storage systems to consolidate its Oracle databases and virtualized systems, running on IBM Power® Systems servers featuring the IBM AIX® operating system and VMware virtualization. It used the IBM HyperSwap high-availability feature to establish a dual-site storage cluster, enabling active-active storage replication. 4Prime also created custom scripts that automatically capture snapshots of the bank’s main production database every 30 minutes, enabling fast, comprehensive recovery in case of error, data loss, or downtime.

Thanks to careful planning and close support from 4Prime, GBSBank was able to complete the entire implementation in four months, while ensuring uninterrupted data access for internal teams and zero disruption to end-customers.

Węgrzynowski says: “This was a fantastic cooperation with 4Prime. We put a lot of effort into mapping out the different stages of the implementation and testing everything very thoroughly; our team also worked over many weekends to ensure that the bank’s normal business was not disrupted. Our efforts paid off: there was no interruption to data access and no systems had to be taken offline during the migration. Everything went exactly according to plan.”

Now that data from its Oracle databases and virtualized systems is synchronously replicated between two FlashSystem 5200 storage volumes, GBSBank has strengthened information availability and business continuity. With a recovery time of just minutes and a recovery point of up to 24 hours back in time, the bank can count on key data remaining readily available, even if the unexpected happens—ensuring uninterrupted service to customers.

With lightning-quick all-flash storage, GBSBank also benefits from accelerated read-response times. Average response times are just 0.7 milliseconds (56 percent faster than before), while response times at load peaks have been reduced by around 86 percent.

“Anyone in the business who works with large amounts of data has definitely experienced a difference since we introduced IBM FlashSystem storage,” comments Węgrzynowski. “Whether it’s working with reports, accessing, extracting, or processing data, response times are noticeably shorter, which translates into a significant increase in productivity.”

Consolidating on highly efficient FlashSystem storage has enabled GBSBank to make significant capacity savings. The bank has made use of both deduplication and native compression to reduce overall storage capacity by roughly 70 percent. It provides the immediate headroom that GBSBank needs to accommodate new customer-centric services, while empowering the bank to continue growing and innovating in the years to come.

Węgrzynowski concludes: “This is only the start for us. In the next three years, we want to become a completely paperless bank, which will put even higher demands on IT in terms of storing and processing electronic files. We know we’ll be ready for this thanks to IBM FlashSystem: it gives us a platform from which we can expand with ease.”

Founded in 1947, Gospodarczy Bank Spółdzielczy w Barlinku (GBSBank)(link resides outside IBM) is a co-operative bank that provides savings, lending, credit card, and insurance services. GBSBank is headquartered in the small town of Barlinek, Poland, and operates a further 15 locations across the country. The bank currently serves approximately 35,000 accounts, ranging from individuals and small businesses to local governments and co-operatives.

4Prime is an information technology and services company specializing in cloud security and data protection services. Based in Warsaw, Poland, 4Prime brings many years of IT industry expertise to help clients solve their toughest security challenges.