In this presentation, you will hear about the initial stages of the journey of Nordea’s Core Banking Replacement Programme into the world of containers.

The Core Banking Programme (CBP) is a crucial part of the Simplification Programme that is underway in Nordea. This is of extreme importance for the bank to be able to realize its business strategy and stay competitive. CBP has two main goals: the replacement of Nordea’s Core Banking Platform and the unification of Nordea’s core systems in four Nordic countries. The chosen Core Banking Platform for CBP is Temenos’ T24.

Nordea’s Development Platform-as-a-Service (dPaaS) is the result of the bank’s initiative to start providing the infrastructure and processes necessary for projects to take advantage of containerized applications. Nordea’s dPaaS is set up on Red Hat OpenShift. Currently, CBP is using the dPaaS platform for the rapid provisioning of development and test environments, for experimenting with the setup, and for getting the platform production-ready.

A CBP project (or environment) in dPaaS is composed of three containers: Oracle Database, Oracle WebLogic, and Oracle Service Bus. The Oracle Database container is where the Core Banking data is persisted. The Oracle WebLogic container is where the T24 application is running and this container connects to the Oracle Database container. In the final container, we have the OSB services that provide (most of) the integration between T24 and the external systems. In dPaaS, that integration to external systems is not currently using actual external systems but it is connecting to virtualized services (mock services).

If you join us for this presentation, you will hear about our experience and lessons learned when setting up the Core Banking Platform in a containerized environment. Furthermore, we will share the positive results we have achieved in terms of provisioning (ease and time), deployment, and also what we gained from having more control of the whole environment (including database). Finally, we will take you through the next steps for CBP in Nordea’s dPaaS, both in the short and long term.