CASE STUDY on Nutanix, creating a private cloud that would support rapid growth, customer mobility and regulatory compliance from day one.
Tsedey Bank currently has 627 branches and over 13,400 employees and serves more than 14 million customers across urban and rural Ethiopia. Despite being a newcomer to the space, it already competes with second and firstgeneration banks because of its ability to scale services quickly, its reach, number of branches, and instant digital banking services including ATM, POS, Mobile banking, internet banking and customer service.
Key Outcomes:
Seamless Scalability
All banking systems are centralised and easy to scale with Nutanix nodes.
Cost Control
Consolidated architecture and predictable TCO reduce operating costs.
Operational Simplicity
Single-pane-of-glass management across compute, storage and networking.
Resilience and Compliance
Built-in Disaster Recovery readiness and full security alignment with INSA.
Empowered Teams
The staff were quickly trained and certified thanks to intuitive tools and strong vendor support.
“ We’ re now competing with first- and secondgeneration banks with a modern, scalable platform that’ s easy to manage and fully supported. Nutanix has helped us build something we’ re proud of,” said Tadele Alemu, Director, IT Infrastructure Management, Tsedey Bank.
Challenge
As a microfinance institution, previously known as ACSI( Amhara Credit and Savings Institute), Tsedey operated on a decentralised model. Each branch ran its own system on local computers, meaning accounts opened in one location were inaccessible at others.
“ There was no centralisation,” said Alemu.“ Each branch worked independently, which created inefficiencies and prevented us from serving customers across our network and the country.”
When the institution transitioned into a fullyfledged bank( Tsedey Bank) in January 2022, it had to comply with strict financial regulations, modernise its systems and deliver banking services nationally. Fortunately, Tsedey had no legacy systems to migrate, giving it the rare advantage of starting from scratch.
A huge benefit upfront was the involvement of Ethiopia’ s Information Network and Security Agency( INSA), which assisted with consulting, RFP preparation, and compliance guidance and ensured that security requirements and regulatory standards were embedded from the very beginning.
“ Our team was new to commercial banking, so INSA’ s support helped us understand what was required from a performance and security perspective,” said Alemu.“ Their experience with helping government and financial institutions across Ethiopia was invaluable in helping us ensure we knew exactly what we needed from our technology partners.”
Solution
When it came time to define its digital backbone, Tsedey Bank was able to embrace modern infrastructure from the outset. Rather than attempting to weave its patchwork of standalone systems together, the bank built a next-generation private cloud environment powered entirely by Nutanix.
Following guidance from Ethiopia’ s Information Network Security Administration( INSA) and in collaboration with local implementation partner Deliver ICT and Telecommunications Technology PLC( Deliver ICT), the team evaluated marketleading technologies and selected Nutanix as the foundation for its operations. The Nutanix Cloud Platform offered a hyperconverged solution that integrated compute, storage and networking into a single, software-defined system that could scale effortlessly and be managed centrally.
“ Looking at global trends we saw that infrastructure was moving to hyperconvergence and software-defined networking( SDN) and that Nutanix stood out as a leader in this area,” said Alemu.“ Additionally, Nutanix gave us everything we needed, including centralised control, scalability and simplicity.”
Tsedey Bank currently runs 100 % of its core banking and enterprise systems on Nutanix,
We’ re now competing with first- and secondgeneration banks with a modern, scalable platform that’ s easy to manage and fully supported. www. intelligentcio. com
INTELLIGENT CIO AFRICA
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