Financial Markets

Business challenge
To capitalize on international growth opportunities, Eurobits wanted a more
flexible and scalable platform for its open banking services, with the ability
to keep client data in defined jurisdictions.

Transformation
Under pressure from regulators, the banking industry is opening up to allow
new competitors to handle payments and account aggregation. For
Eurobits—which helps banks give trusted third-parties access to account
information—this change represents a significant growth opportunity. To
preserve its first-mover advantage, Eurobits migrated to IBM® Cloud™,
gaining the flexibility, scale and resilience it needed to serve a rapidly
growing client base.

Results
Eurobits Technologies “IBM API Connect enables
us to deploy and manage
Faster APIs easily and cost-
and more flexible scaling of services
removes barriers to growth Transforming the financial effectively, helping
Eurobits stay at the

Security-rich landscape with robust, forefront of payment

platform capability.”
single-tenant cloud servers give confi-
dence to financial-services clients security-rich services on —Arturo Gonzalez, CEO, Eurobits

Compliance IBM Cloud

with local data protection laws facilitates
international expansion Eurobits is the European pioneer of account aggregation services for banking.
Serving the largest financial institutions across Europe, including BBVA,
Santander (Spain), ICA Banken (Sweden), La Banque Postale (France) and KBC
(Belgium), Eurobits provides highly secure and seamless connections between
banks, telcos, utilities and payment providers in 17 countries. Eurobits has been
heavily involved in the development of the EU’s second Payment Services Share this
Directive, and also provides electronic invoicing services through an API.
Gearing up for Testing the Waters
growth After analyzing offerings from all the
major global cloud vendors, Eurobits
As a pioneer in banking account
chose IBM Cloud as its strategic
information services, Eurobits helps
platform. “IBM had something
banks work together so that their
unique,” says Arturo Gonzalez. “Our
customers can easily pay from and
customer base is mostly banks and
manage their bank accounts at
FinTechs; and in terms of security
multiple banking providers. To
perception, banks do not want their
support both of these activities,
data on multi-tenant environments.
Eurobits provides secure APIs that
The biggest differentiator for IBM was
enable trusted parties to securely
that we could have a hybrid solution
share customer account details, and
where the most critical information
allows customers to transfer funds
would go through a single-tenant
without logging into their own bank.
architecture, and we could use a
In January 2018, the EU Revised multi-tenant architecture for less
Payment Services Directive (PSD2) critical information.”
entered into force. This directive transactions and geographic remain in-country. To meet these
As the first stage in its cloud
enables bank customers to use third- coverage. The company was hosting requirements, we sought a cloud
migration, and to test the IBM Cloud
party providers to manage their its core systems on co-located provider with a global presence.”
before fully committing, Eurobits
finances. Payment service providers hardware in a third-party data center.
Further, the new world of open created a disaster-recovery (DR)
will be legally required to support Although this environment was fully
banking requires different operational environment in an IBM data center in
PSD2 in September 2019. virtualized, the underlying physical
models. Some service requests are Paris for its existing VMware vSphere
infrastructure still acted as a brake on
Arturo Gonzalez, CEO, explains: for financial information on a daily or deployments. VMware vSphere
the company’s development. Every
“Eurobits was the first player in even intra-daily basis, while others Replication synchronizes entire virtual
time Eurobits outgrew a server, it had
Europe in what is now called open require only one-time access for a machines from the production
to wait for its service provider to
banking, and for many years we were data snapshot. All of these services deployments—initially in the third-
complete upgrades or to provision
playing in a pretty empty field. With require suitable APIs to connect to party data center—to IBM Cloud bare
additional hardware.
PSD2 and other developments, open and use the Eurobits service. metal servers. An orchestration tool
banking is now a very strong market “We needed greater flexibility, both to automatically deploys contingency
force, not only in Europe but all over be able to grow the business on a The previous Eurobits model for virtual-machine infrastructure in the
the world. We wanted to move into steady basis and because our deploying APIs to banks lacked IBM Cloud should Eurobits need to
this fast growing space with its huge computing requirements rise and fall scale and sophistication. While it failover its production environments.
opportunities; speed was crucial, unpredictably,” says Arturo Gonzalez. had worked well for the relatively
small set of clients and transactions “Working with IBM Services gave us
because we knew our first-mover “With international expansion in mind,
in the past, Eurobits knew that it confidence, because we could
competitive advantage would not we also had to be able to comply
needed a more flexible model to actually talk directly to people for
last forever.” with local data protection laws,
cope with the rapid growth in support, whereas the other big cloud
central bank regulations and fintech
Eurobits needed to build a new demand for its services. players provide only anonymous or
laws that require financial data to
infrastructure with sufficient flexibility automated support,” says Arturo
to support growth in clients, Gonzalez. “When you run into

2
technical difficulties, the ability to growing business, adding more smaller potential clients. IBM API piece of software needs to be
work with real people definitely users, and IBM Cloud gives us the Connect gives us great flexibility independent from the others.
adds value.” ability to support expansion and has lowered the cost of entry to Containerization enables us to
combined with high availability—and our services, opening up an entire perform corrective actions in any
Migrating critical develop new products.” new market.” connector without impacting the
overall architecture of our aggregator
workloads to the Eurobits also uses IBM Cloud file
Microservices on solution. The DevOps team is really
cloud storage for a large file repository
Kubernetes
happy about how this technology will
connected via NFS to some of its make their lives easier when staging
Following the success of the DR production servers, and IBM into production after we apply
The second stage in Eurobits’
initiative, Eurobits and the IBM Cloud Cloud block storage for backed-up corrective or developmental patches
cloud migration is containerizing
services team moved to the next disk images. to a service.”
applications. The company uses
step: the migration of all production
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service to
environments to the cloud. The team Accessing new create a more resilient and elastic Extreme flexibility
used VMware vSphere High
Availability to set up three replica revenue streams architecture that scales with
Running on the IBM Cloud gives
changing client demands. For
clusters for its VMware ESXi servers To address its challenges around the Eurobits the performance, availability,
account information services, for
on IBM Cloud bare metal servers in growing diversity of services offered scalability, flexibility and security it
example, Eurobits uses Java-based
Amsterdam; and the initial DR through APIs, Eurobits selected IBM needs to stay ahead of competitors in
microservices in containers to
environment for VMware remains in API Connect® on IBM Cloud, which the fast growing and increasingly
significantly accelerate every stage
Paris. For systems where dedicated has enabled the company to tap into international market for open banking
from development to production
servers are not required, Eurobits a new segment of the market. services. VMware vSphere on IBM
whenever one of its 400 bank
uses IBM Cloud offerings including Cloud bare metal servers gives
connector services needs updating.
VMware vSphere on IBM Cloud, Arturo Gonzalez comments: “As the Eurobits dedicated computing power
As the bank connectors share many
VMware vCenter Server on IBM number and variety of engagement to speed through transactions
physical and logical resources, using
Cloud, and IBM Spectrum Protect™ models grow, it would be virtually without the potential security risks
a container-based approach instead
Plus on IBM Cloud for backing up impossible to roll out our own API inherent in a multi-tenant landscape.
of multiple VMs enables better
and protecting VMware data. delivery model. IBM API Connect What’s more, the company can
utilization of IT resources and also
enables us to deploy and manage rapidly extend its core systems onto
Eurobits employs VMware APIs to improves performance.
APIs easily and cost-effectively, new bare metal servers, enabling it to
automate the creation and migration helping Eurobits stay at the forefront meet emerging client demand.
Arturo Gonzalez comments:
of virtual machines for its production of payment platform capability.” “IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
deployments on the IBM Cloud, using “One of our major clients is about to
allows us to move from a fairly
both its own scripts and scripts Pablo Rovira, CRO / CMO at Eurobits, run a big marketing campaign that
monolithic architectural approach
supplied by IBM. All the VMware comments: “IBM API Connect will multiply their user numbers by a
to a more distributed approach
virtual machines will be backed enables us to publish APIs to a factor of 10 or 20 within the space of
that uses microservices and allows
up to the Paris disaster recovery marketplace where smaller clients a month or two,” says Arturo
us to individually manage each
data center. can consume and pay for services as Gonzalez. “VMware vSphere on IBM
bank connector.”
and when they need them. Before, Cloud gives us the extreme flexibility
Eurobits initially migrated 30 VMs to Eurobits was strongly oriented we need for this kind of scenario.
Mani Ghelichkhani adds: “Given the
the IBM Cloud, and today runs towards large B2B clients, and our Running on the IBM Cloud also
technology we need to use to get all
approximately 50 VMs. Mani client relationships involved daily supports our ongoing international
the information from the bank
Ghelichkhani, IT Director, explains the face-to-face contact. The cost of that expansion, enabling us to scale
accounts of the end-users, each
drivers for this growth: “We are a delivery model shut us off from seamlessly in size and geography.”
3
Highly secure and stringent regulations in multiple
geographies. In particular, the use of
complete our migration to a reactive
Solution components
architecture with Kubernetes—the
compliant bare metal servers keeps data and biggest benefits are yet to come.” • IBM® API Connect®
Where local regulations require transactions physically isolated from • IBM Cloud™
other environments on the cloud, He concludes: “The fact that Eurobits
personal and financial data to remain • IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
giving confidence to Eurobits’ risk- works with IBM gives our clients in
in-country, IBM’s global network of
averse clients. the financial services industry a high • IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions
cloud data centers will make it easier
level of comfort and trust. We needed • IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
for Eurobits to comply by simply firing
up local instances of the required Always open for to accomplish this migration in order
to succeed in a market that is
• IBM Spectrum Protect Plus on
services. Both VMware virtualization business growing extremely fast, and that
IBM Cloud
and Kubernetes containerization are • VMware vCenter Server on
places heavy regulatory challenges
ideally suited to support the rapid The use of VMware High Availability IBM Cloud
and restrictions on us. With the
redeployment of existing functionality technology within the production
backing of the IBM Cloud, we face
in new locations. Architecting cloud center helps keep vital account
these challenges with confidence.”
applications as microservices and information and payment services Take the next step
deploying them on IBM Cloud available at all times. And with a full To learn more about the IBM Cloud
Kubernetes Service also improves DR solution on the IBM Cloud, for VMware Solutions portfolio,
horizontal scalability and overall Eurobits can rapidly and reliably “IBM Cloud Kubernetes
please contact your IBM
application uptime. Finally, there is restore services in the event of an Service allows us to move representative or IBM Business
a security benefit in the isolation unexpected outage, and at lower cost from a fairly monolithic Partner, or visit the following website:
of services. of ownership than in its previous architectural approach to ibm.com/cloud/vmware
hosted landscape. a more distributed
In summary, Eurobits clients are approach that uses
mostly banks and FinTechs that “If a service goes down, it is now microservices and allows
require compliant, security-rich, high- much easier to automatically bring it us to individually
performance solutions with proven back up,” says Arturo Gonzalez. “In manage each bank
recovery capabilities to support practice, this means less downtime connector.”
business continuity. By meeting these and faster recovery, and we expect
requirements, IBM Cloud enables these metrics to improve once we —Arturo Gonzalez, CEO, Eurobits
Eurobits and its clients to comply with

© Copyright IBM Corporation 2018. 1 New Orchard Road, Armonk, New York 10504-1722 United States. Produced in the United States of America, October 2018. IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, IBM API Connect,
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