Danamon Improves User Experience with always available, fast, and secure access to banking services using F5’s solutions

Business Challenges

High internet adoption rate has spurred relentless demand for digital financial services in the country. The ability to provide real-time and secure access to banking services to users, regardless of time and location, is a key competitive edge. While the business keep pace with customer’s demands for highly accessible services, their infrastructure have to support the delivery of business services through peak and trough periods.

On the other hand, internal users’ access to applications is equally important for a smooth operation, especially for the users from thousands of branches all over the country to core banking applications and information seamlessly.

Danamon is recognized by customers across the country for its service excellence, as proven by the numerous awards won by the bank recently. To maintain the quality of its service while fulfilling customers insatiable demands for accessibility in the digital banking era, the need for an always-available and highly secure 24/7 access to digital banking services is paramount.

Solution

They began to look for solutions based on the following criteria – good vendor reputation, feature-rich product, integrated high performance, reliability and security, and Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance. Following a thorough evaluation, Danamon decided to partner with F5 Networks. The partnership has now spanned over a decade.

Danamon decided on an F5 advanced Application Delivery Networking (ADN) solution. They deployed BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager (GTM), BIG-IP Application Acceleration Manager (AAM) and BIG-IP Application Security manager (ASM) modules, to ensure fast, secure, and always-available delivery of banking applications and services to both its internal and external users.

“Maintaining the highest level of service excellence is our top priority. To achieve this, we need to ensure our users have the highest level of accessibility and security to our banking services. We looked for solutions that can easily integrate with our existing platform, provide flexibility we need to adjust the solutions to meet our needs, and more importantly have excellent community and support,” said Susilo Hardiyantono, Head of Information Technology, Bank Danamon.

With F5 advanced ADN solution, Danamon is able to enhance their ability to manage network traffic and optimize applications, ensured constant high availability of applications and data to thousands of branches across the country. The solution also protects applications with comprehensive, policy-based web application security that blocks attacks and routes the connections away from critical servers, or rejects them outright.

In addition to BIG-IP AAM, capacity on servers is maximized with improved response time to and from the core banking system. An accelerated access to and from the core banking system, regardless of the time and location, provided users with the highest level of service excellence.

“We always pride ourselves with providing the best services to our customers, which is the same principle that guided us when we launched our internet banking services. Our key differentiation lies in providing our customers with the highest level of accessibility and security of internet banking services. Therefore a partner who understands that principle and able to meet our stringent criteria is key to our success.” Susilo continued, “Our choice is clear, because only F5 Networks have the technology and experience to support our business, and also meet our high criteria to maintain our level of service quality.

Benefits

Danamon now has a highly agile infrastructure that can adjust to growth demands and delivery of new services, keeping user experience with the bank high and their internal users have constant seamless access to the new core banking services without any constraint. With the F5 solution, Bank Danamon maintains its competitive edge and able to ensure the reliability, performance, availability and security of their digital banking services and the new core banking system.

Complete visibility and securing applications

“Our customers are important. We want to provide seamless experience to our users when accessing our banking services,” said Susilo.

Danamon uses the BIG-IP ASM to protect applications with comprehensive, policy-based web application security. Besides having visibility into attacks, ASM correlates multiple violations to detect sophisticated attacks and mitigate threats. Most importantly, the solution is able to dynamically boost performance and keep services constantly available.

Seamless User Experience

Having seamless access to digital banking services at convenience has become more and more vital, as customers’ expectations grow in sophistication. Customers expect banking services to keep pace with their highly mobile daily activities, therefore the ability to access banking services from anywhere, anytime, regardless of location and device is becoming increasingly crucial in today’s banking landscape.

“Any inconvenience in accessing banking services affects a customer’s experience with our brand. To deliver the highest level of service excellence to our customers, we are committed to provide fast, highly available and secure access to banking services. One of the ways we achieved that is through implementing F5 solutions,” said Susilo.

Improved Efficiency in Numerous Branches

“Being able to run as fast as our customer is equally important as delivering seamless access to banking services for our customers. With the growing number of customers and banking activities, we need solutions that will enable us to eliminate any performance bottlenecks while boosting our employees’ productivity,” said Susilo.

Organization depends on applications to support their business operations and drive revenue. At the same time, users are demanding more from those applications, including faster load times and access across a wide variety of devices. F5’s Application Acceleration Manager provided Danamon’s internal users with a lightning fast access to the bank’s core banking system, by overcoming WAN latency and maximizing server capacity. This in turn speeds application response time, on average improving performance by 40%.

Susilo added, “By shortening the response time, we are able to reduce server’s workload as well as increase the efficiency in bandwidth usage throughout our branches across the country. Therefore, we are able to use the extra remaining bandwidth to deliver other transactional and non-transactional data.”

By deploying F5’s solutions, Danamon ultimately improve their user experience and enable them to maintain their service excellence.

“Looking at the result with our core banking system, we are now in a process to expand the use of F5 solutions. To further improve performance, we are implementing the F5 Application Delivery Networking (ADN) solutions for other web based applications - both transactional applications like Loan Origination System and Collection Management System, as well as non-transactional application such as internal portal,” said Susilo.