Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer enhances Moneta’s move to digital banking

Digital banking isn’t a new trend, it’s been growing for 25 years as consumers demand more efficient ways to access banking data and complete financial transactions outside of local branches. However, the variety and ubiquity of digital banking are causing financial institutions to rethink how they can optimize their internal systems to meet the ever-increasing demand.

Moneta Money Bank in the Czech Republic has more than 100,000 commercial customers and 1.5 million clients and has been working with Oracle to improve its operations and the digital experiences of its customers.

Jiri Mizera, Chief Information Officer, and Jakub Valenta, Director of Data and IT Infrastructure, Moneta Money Bank describe why they’re investing to improve the digital experience for their customers in the Czech Republic. Jakub explains, “As Moneta, we strive to be the digital leader and innovator in the Czech market. We bring the digital experience through to our customers and make sure they can access and acquire our products without the need to visit other branches.” Due to its growing investment in digital banking services, Moneta has won several prestigious awards in various professional and public surveys and competitions.

Moneta has been using Oracle Exadata Database Machine in their data center for several years, so when the need to upgrade the platform and to begin their migration to the cloud happened a the same time, the decision on what to do next was easy. Jakub explains, "We did not feel brave enough to move fully to the cloud, so we opted for the excellent Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer, which is a way to move halfway to the cloud, in our own time." As Moneta was planning to adopt more cloud services, it was a logical evolution to start with Exadata Cloud@Customer, where they get cloud automation, patching, and support from Oracle.

Since Exadata Cloud@Customer is deployed in their data center, it helps them address data residency, security, and latency concerns. For Moneta, having low-latency connections between Oracle databases and applications is critical. Jakub explains, "We run our critical workloads on Exadata, so the databases must be located close to our applications. So both Exadata Database Machine and Exadata Cloud@Customer run in our data centers in Prague.”

Moneta is rapidly expanding due to organic growth and mergers with other financial institutions in the Czech Republic. Both challenges require them to accelerate the pace of development and testing environments, which historically would have required them to buy new hardware and wait for it to be delivered. Jakub says that they can now avoid these delays, "The flexibility of the Exadata Cloud@Customer will come in handy as we will be able to scale up and buy more computing power as needed, without having to wait for delivery of new hardware.”

With their extensive move into digital banking, Moneta now has many development projects running in parallel, which could create a challenge when they compete for development and test environments. Jakub explains that competition is not a problem, “It’s easy with Exadata Cloud@Customer because we can easily increase the spend for more compute (pay-as-you-go approach) and have more test environments compared to what we have today.”

Moneta recommends Exadata Cloud@Customer if you have existing applications and infrastructure that make it difficult to go all the way to a public cloud environment. Using Exadata Cloud@Customer was not a dramatic difference for Moneta’s database administration team as they were already familiar with Oracle Database and Oracle systems. Jakub adds, “I would say where it did change is with more flexibility and the ability to add more capacity when needed.”

What’s next for Moneta as they innovate and navigate upcoming challenges and opportunities? Jiri concludes, “We are quite open to a cloud strategy and Exadata Cloud@Customer is a step in the right direction.”

Moneta Money Bank, a.s. provides a full range of commercial banking services for retail and institutional customers. The Company offers mortgage refinancing, loan consolidation, accounts for retail and corporate clients, online banking, and electronic statement of accounts. Moneta Money Bank serves customers internationally.

To learn more about Moneta Money Bank: click here

To learn more about Exadata Cloud@Customer: click here