BNP Paribas signs a new multi-year partnership agreement with IBM Cloud

In addition to the already established infrastructure from 2019, BNP Paribas will now dedicate a new area in its own data centers to IBM Cloud, planned for 2028. This new investment aims to enhance the Group's resilience and is designed to provide the necessary redundancy for uninterrupted continuity of critical banking services such as payments, while maintaining the security of customer data and the bank's information systems.

For BNP Paribas, this initiative is part of the practical implementation of the requirements of the European DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) regulation, aimed at strengthening the operational resilience requirements of financial institutions, particularly in the areas of business continuity and IT risk management. The creation of this new cloud infrastructure and the rigorous management of risks related to cloud service providers can help the bank's business continuity and protection of customer data.

The renewal and expansion of this partnership with IBM will allow the bank to enhance its capabilities by leveraging GPUs on IBM Cloud integrated with BNP Paribas' cloud infrastructure. These complementary resources aim to support business units in experimenting and deploying generative AI use cases.

BNP Paribas is also continuing its application modernization efforts with a cloud-native approach, based on the use of containers (microservices) via Red Hat OpenShift®, IBM's Kubernetes container management platform. This solution will help enable the bank to develop modular, scalable, and portable applications, to offer greater flexibility and responsiveness in managing banking services. It is also being built to allow the deployment of new applications, particularly in payment and payment systems.

“We continuously invest in cutting-edge technologies to strengthen the resilience of our infrastructures and drive innovation for our clients, employees, and partners" says Marc Camus, Chief Information Officer of BNP Paribas. "By combining GPUs as a service, a dedicated, state-of-the-art environment within our data centers, and a cloud-native infrastructure, we are strengthening our technological foundation, as well as the security and the compliance of our information systems."

“For decades, IBM and BNP Paribas have worked together to build the banking infrastructure of the future, underpinned by the necessary resilience. Since then, the bank has joined IBM's growing ecosystem of financial institutions and technology partners leveraging IBM Cloud for Financial Services to drive their mission of providing the best digital banking experience to customers, with security and compliance at the forefront” said Alan Peacock, General Manager of IBM Cloud. “This latest milestone in our partnership will provide expanded enterprise-grade Cloud services across the entire bank to unlock new possibilities with AI and cloud innovation not only for BNP Paribas, but for enterprises around the world.”