MADRID and ARMONK, N.Y., Jan. 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Banco Sabadell, Spain's fourth largest private banking group, and IBM Services (NYSE: IBM) announced the signing of a ten-year services agreement designed to help the bank boost digitization and support the strategic evolution of its business model with IBM cloud capabilities.

The financial services industry can face intense challenges related to regulatory compliance, the emergence of new business models and the demand for the digitalization of financial consumption. With IBM, Banco Sabadell plans to transform its IT infrastructure to a modern technology platform that integrates all its data and applications enabling a broader client-centric view.

The new agreement extends IBM's relationship with Banco Sabadell and is planned to make it possible to leverage IBM cloud capabilities, helping drive modernization of the bank's IT environment. IBM Services will help Banco Sabadell migrate its existing applications to a hybrid cloud environment, meeting required cybersecurity standards, to help it meet continuous regulatory changes.

The collaboration is intended to simplify the bank's dispersed technological infrastructure so that it can move and manage data, services and workflows across multiple clouds to allow it to continue to offer its global clients its products and services in a manner that is focused on speed fast, security and compliance.

"This agreement with IBM helps enable us to advance into the modernization and transformation of our technology infrastructure and in the simplification of our operational model," said Miguel Montes, Banco Sabadell Chief Operations and People Officer. "With this, we are not only continuing to increase our resilience, security and scalability capabilities, but we can also adopt key elements of the new technology paradigm like cloud, the intense use of data and artificial intelligence."

Red Hat OpenShift technology, together with IBM Services, will also support Sabadell in managing a hybrid cloud environment to deploy on-container architecture, new cloud-native applications and modernize current ones designed for more flexibility and speed to help drive a more agile customer-oriented innovation.

This solution provides capabilities such as scalability to help face the continuous increase in demand for resiliency and security provided by cloud solutions, and speed to launch new digital projects to overcome the traditional friction between applications and infrastructure.

"We are excited to collaborate with Banco Sabadell to help advance its cloud journey that can bring innovation to meet the everchanging demands of its clients and help address the complex security and regulatory requirements of today's financial industry," said Juan Zufiria, Senior Vice President of IBM Global Technology Services. "An open hybrid cloud platform, built and managed with IBM Services' industry experience, can help lay the foundation for financial services providers to respond to the challenges of the industry and position them to securely integrate with IBM financial services-ready public cloud capabilities in the future."

In parallel TSB, the United Kingdom affiliate of Banco Sabadell, signed a contract where IBM will manage the bank's technology in the UK.

IBM and Banco Sabadell signed this transaction in IBM's fourth quarter of 2019.

About Banco Sabadell
With a history stretching back 138 years, Banco Sabadell is Spain's fourth largest banking group and one of the best capitalized Spanish financial institutions. Banco Sabadell has assets in excess of 220 billion euros, a network of more than 2,400 branches and has earned the trust of 12 million customers.

Banco Sabadell has gone through a historic period of growth in the last decade, demonstrating its strength and its international footprint, as well as expanding into Mexico and the United Kingdom, where it acquired TSB Bank in 2015.

About IBM Cloud
With over $20B in annual cloud revenue, IBM has built a leading enterprise hybrid cloud business. This includes a comprehensive range of as-a-service offerings, software, hardware and professional services that enable IBM to advise, move, build and manage cloud solutions across public, private and on-premises environments. Through its global network of more than 60 cloud data centers across 19 countries and 18 availability zones across 6 regions, IBM public cloud helps enterprises in all industries to meet security, resiliency, performance, and global deployment requirements. Built on an open source, multitenant environment, clients have secured access to an enterprise-grade IaaS and a leading PaaS that provides them with the latest developer capabilities and ready-to-go innovation engines. This includes more than 190 cloud-native APIs, such as AI, blockchain, IoT, serverless and quantum computing, and consistent function all the way to the edge. Several financial institutions including BNP Paribas, Bank of America, Westpac and others are already working with IBM on their public cloud journey. BNP has strengthened its ability to subscribe to "As a Service" IT services through the IBM Public Cloud.

For more information, visit https://www.ibm.com/cloud/public

Contact:
Patricia Núñez +34 91 397 77 82

SOURCE IBM