 Welcome back to Red Hat Summit 2021. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise, of course, virtually in this case. And I'm pleased to welcome Victor Corumpas, who is the Senior Vice President of Digital Banking at Bank Mandiri. Coming in from Jakarta, welcome to theCUBE, Victor. Great to see you. Hi Dave, great to see you and great to be invited here in theCUBE. Yeah, you're very welcome. And I wonder if you could just give us an overview of the bank, maybe talk a little bit about your strategy, your customers, you know, what the focus is of your company and what your role is there. Okay, maybe I give a short overview about Bank Mandiri itself. So Bank Mandiri is a state-owned enterprise owned by the government, but we're also a public company. Currently, we already have a very big distribution channel in over, so you know Indonesia is an island's country, it's a very huge country. So we are representing all over Indonesia from province of Aceh and up to province of Pakua. And we have about 2,600 branches all over Indonesia and about 15,000 ATMs all over Indonesia. So Bank Mandiri itself is focused on a lot of segment, customer segment in Indonesia, from the corporate side, small, medium enterprise and also retail banking. Now, we are currently focused in turning ourself to have more digital capability. And currently in our current situations, actually it is very good, about 95% of our transactions is already coming from the electronic channel. So it's only about 5% that are coming from the branches. But we know that this is still a journey and we are building more digital capabilities and features and functions on our digital channels to our customer. Got it. Okay, and so your digital journey kind of coincides, I guess, in a way with your container adoption journey. I think that started a few years ago. And so maybe you could talk a little bit about that. I mean, in thinking about modernizing your application portfolio, obviously containers have been around forever but they weren't packaged in a way that could actually be easily utilized. And now you're seeing people in IT roles like yourself really leaning in. Maybe you could talk about some of the technology considerations that impacted that desire to actually leverage containers. I think first is about the scalability. Because with a monolithic architecture, it's kind of difficult to scale up for only specific features. By doing container micro-services, we have options to scale up in a very fast way because one of the features is auto-scaling on the container architectures. Bang Mandiri is a very focused on the transaction banking. So you might say Bang Mandiri is supporting the economy of the country because in any given time in Bang Mandiri, we are running about 4,000 transactions per second. That's a huge transaction number. And having said that, our channel, like I told you, already running about 95% of the transactions. So scalability is always important for us because especially like right now, in Indonesia it's a festive month. It's Ramadan month where Muslim is actually doing fasting. But at the same time, actually there is a lot of needs and people do a lot of transactions. And on this kind of festive seasons, the transaction can be increased up to 40 or 50% suddenly. And that's kind of things always happen in Bang Mandiri. And we must be ready and we must have a scalability on demand. Now, containerizations enabling us to do that. Other thing is about flexibility because on the old days, actually when we want to set up a new environment, it's very difficult and takes a lot of time. And that's affecting the time to market our products by doing the containerizations and putting it on a CICD continuous integration called continuous development platform where we call DevSecOps platform. That kind of things becoming automatic because we set up the DevSecOps platform. And the third one is the consistency actually. So by doing the containerizations, we can put the APIs on our backend APIs in the container itself. And actually it's delivering the environment and a consistent experience to our customer because for example, we promise our customer that every transaction should be finished within two seconds from their mobile banking up to our host and back forward to their mobile banking is only two seconds. So that kind of thing is driving us to move to the current technology which we're using containerization and microservices. Okay, so 4,000 transactions per second. You can't do that on ERC 20 Ethereum for all you crypto fans out there. That's pretty high volume. And if I understand it correctly, Victor, your role is really to envision this digital environment and then ultimately make it happen from a technology standpoint. Is that correct? That's correct. That's correct. So okay, so you now have a number of product lines and teams, you're using the same container platform. Maybe you could share with our audience some of the best practices and learnings that you've taken away on this journey. So I think first of all, we can reuse a lot of components by doing this containerization platform. It's different when we still use the monolithic platform like the application server of Java application server. By using containerization actually, we're providing like a service banking as a service. So whenever we build a new channel, for example, the first one we build a new service, for example, like a fund transfer service. But when we create another channel, for example, a corporate banking electronic channel, or we create another, let's say, wealth management channel, whatever we already built before can be reusable instantly by using this technology. So if I might say that actually, there is a lot of best practices coming by using this platform. And my team got a lot of benefit in terms of faster development time. And also they can deliver the product and service in a high quality manner, minimize the number of error as well. You know, there's a lot of choices out there, obviously. I wonder if you could share what led you to the choice of Red Hat and OpenShift? Okay. So first of all, before we choose the platform actually, we also comparing ourselves with the FinTech and also with the Big Tech in Indonesia as well. So we see that actually they already stopped using Kubernetes and their platform is quite stable and even they can support about 90 to 100 million of customers without any issues at all. So when we see this, we learn about a lot of platform and we finally choose OpenShift because we think that OpenShift and we already do our research. OpenShift is quite stable. And for bank like us that having 4,500 transactions per second, stability is number one, availability is also number one. Now, having said that, after doing our research, we choose OpenShift and we implemented OpenShift in our environment because we promised our customer to provide 99.95% availability Can I just, I'm sorry to interrupt you, Victor. Can you just repeat that? You cut out a little bit. So you said you promised your customers to deliver and then you cut out a little bit. Can you just repeat what you just said there? Okay, so we're giving a promise to our customer providing a 99.95% availability. So this is the starting point of our channel. Sure, in the fissions, we have a fission also to providing four nines which is 99.99%. But I mean, the starting point is 99.95%. And because we have that demand, that requirement, that's one of the reason we choose the OpenShift and Red Hat as our technology stack platform. Got it, okay. And so I have a question. What was it like in terms of just the skills and the adoption for your developers? Was it a big gap to go from where you were to where you are today? Did you have to, what kind of training did you have to do? Did you have to do any sort of outsourcing to accelerate that? Maybe you could describe that, how you closed that skills gap. So definitely in the beginning is quite challenging because although they're already using modern languages like Java or Kotlin, but to understand the concept and to design correctly, yes, we did a lot of training to them. It takes me about three months to give them the proper training in terms of building the right microservices platform and also to building modular architecture in terms of the customer channel. Because this will be the fundamental when you build it correctly in the beginning and actually at the later point, you will enjoy the benefit. So the first three months actually is training and doing research and development and doing a lot of trial and errors. But after the three months, actually we already have the right technology stack, have the right models and our DevSecOps is already working. Then actually after that, the speed is very fast because it's Prince, we do HL way of working, the HL SDLC. It's only one month. So every one month, we already have new features coming in. So that's what we call a huge transformation, a digital transformation inside of our bank. It's three months, actually not bad. I mean, I would have thought on average, it's going to take five or six months to get people up to speed. So three months is pretty good. And I'm also inferring that you weren't just paving the cow path. You weren't just saying, okay, let's take our traditional and then refactor it to digital. You had to re-envision what digital looked like because the digital is different than the traditional. So that's actually pretty good ramp rate. I wonder if you could just go ahead, please comment if you could. Because when you say about revamp, so actually it's not on the IT side only, but also the business side. We implement new way as well. So actually they're implementing a new model. So they're using a design thinking and also a co-creation model where now when we're building a product, so we're not writing the old product in your new way. No, we totally building it from scratch. And involving our key customer and our stakeholder when we're building this product. So actually we implementing new models, what we call design thinking and also co-creation with our customer. So that actually changing the phase of the customer electronic channel a lot. And actually when we want to deploy, we invite our customer to test it first. We call it like usability testing. If they like it, we continue the design. If they don't like it, they give us a feedback how they would like it to be changed. And that's, we appreciate our customer feedback because customer experience is everything now, yeah? So the product can be accepted if the experience on that product is really making customer solving their problem, solving the customer problem and making them enjoying doing transactions in our mobile banking product. I think this is a really important point for people to understand. So you weren't just paving the cow path, I call it. You're taking the old and just try to refactor it and make it exactly turn it into digital. You had to really think about the business, the business processes, the dependencies, the customer experience and then bring it back. What have been some of the business outcomes of this initiative? And maybe after that we can get into some of the future plans. So the outcome, I think this journey since last year, not last year, actually, since October, 2019 we already start the journey. What took us by surprise is actually the pandemic. Suddenly at the first three months when we have the pandemic of COVID, we are being forced to close a lot of branches for temporary because we want to avoid the pandemic situation. And that time actually the demand using our digital channel is increasing a lot. But because we already prepare, actually, we get the benefit. One of the things is the business benefit is relating so during the pandemic nobody can come to the branch and mostly the account opening actually happening online. So we even got about 9,000 account opening per day which is something that we are not imagining before. So the benefit is very clear by using this technology actually enabling us to provide digital capability for our customer and enabling us to open more accounts. We see ourself can grow even not linear but exponentially grow by using this platform. Talking about that Indonesia is a huge country with we have about 250 million populations. And actually there's still a lot of people is not having a bank account at all. Now by doing this actually we open opportunity doing financial inclusion for those people that need a banking account now they can research by using the digital platform as well. Yeah that's an awesome story and it goes back to the reason the real motivator for moving to Kubernetes and containers was scale. And you know you obviously started your digital journey prior to the pandemic but a lot of customers and I'm sure you as well were forced to speed up a portion anyway of the digital component because of the pandemic. Like you said people couldn't walk into the branches. So but now you've got some more time to think about that journey. You've had a lot of learnings 2020 was like a petri dish of experimentation but in real time having to serve customers. What's the future look like for the bank's technology journey? Okay so basically we are not stopping only on the retail side. We want to redefine our customer journey also on the wholesale side and also on the small medium enterprise. There is still a lot of thing that need to be done and required by the customer actually. So on the SME side we want to give them easier access for financing their businesses. I think when we are back to the new normal the business need to have funding for starting their business again. So building an SME platform for them will help a lot and will help the country as well. On the retail side actually like I told you we are focusing on the more financial inclusion because I give you example, right? From the 230 million of Indonesians populations I think by today maybe it's only about 50 million customer that already have a banking account. So there is still a lot of people that need an access faster and cheaper and more efficient way for doing banking transaction. So this also will become our focus. And the last part is actually corporate. What we see now a lot of the corporate require us to open API connectivity doing open banking with them. The government actually the central bank supporting all the banks. They are trying to create an API play books now and then they want to create an API standard for all the youths corporate also can connected to the bank directly using API. So this is also our focus because it will help the country economy when the economy costs the transaction costs getting more efficient, getting more cheaper and there is a lot of transaction can be supported by our bank as well. So I think that's the future that we are imagining and I'm really hope that the pandemic will be finished and we come back to the new normal and we can support more transactions for this country. Yeah, you're here to that. I call it the new abnormal. But so this is a great story. Everybody loves to talk about disruption. We do as well. But people think, oh, it's out with the old in with the new and it's not like that. This is a great story Victor of an established incumbent that is modernizing its applications and its digital experience. And of course the incumbent has the advantage of it's a real business that has customers that has a data that has experiences and if it can modernize its infrastructure and its application portfolio, it actually has an advantage because it's got way more features, way more data, way more customers and more resources. So Victor, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate you sharing your story. Thank you, Dave. Thank you for inviting me in. Thank you. That was our pleasure. And thank you for watching Red Hat Summit 21. This is theCUBE.