The World’s Best Digital Bank Harnesses More Compute Power to Deliver on a Digital-First Strategy

Georgia is home to some of the earliest known sites of winemaking, gold mining, and textiles. Lately, however, we’ve become known for something else: banking.

Founded in 1994, Bank of Georgia is a customer-centric universal bank. In 2024, Global Finance named us the World’s Best Digital Bank — an achievement that reflects our commitment to delivering innovative, inclusive, and customer-focused digital banking solutions. We are one of the country’s leading employers and offer retail, SME, and corporate banking services, including term deposits, asset management, and stock and loan portfolios.

We play a pivotal role in the country’s financial landscape, empowering individuals and businesses to achieve their financial goals and contribute to Georgia’s economy. As our technology tribe lead, I ensure that our IT infrastructure and digital ecosystem are resilient, scalable, efficient, and fully aligned with our business needs. Doing so allows us to effectively leverage more technology to enhance the customer experience. Increasingly, this technology requires more compute power, so we had to upgrade our infrastructure to accommodate our long-term goals.

Finding support through every growth stage

Digital banking has always been a top priority at the bank. We’ve continued to invest heavily in digital transformation, adopting a digital-first strategy rather than expanding physical branches.

The latest version of our app consolidates multiple financial services — including banking, stock trading, utility payments, and insurance — in a single user-friendly platform that our customers can access from anywhere in the world. We call it our “super app,” which provides customers with the convenience of a bank branch and a group of advisors at their fingertips. It’s a big part of our business and needs tremendous power for a seamless experience. Fortunately, we have HPE.

HPE is one of our longstanding technology partners, having collaborated on projects for more than 20 years. HPE has supported us through every stage of our growth, providing not just hardware but strategic insights and technological innovations.

A great example involved the shift to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic. We had started building our VDI environment using HPE hardware back in 2016, so we could quickly and efficiently transition thousands of employees to off-site work in a few days with minimal disruptions and secure connectivity from any location.

The scenario demonstrated the value of our HPE partnership. Because they support traditional and virtual infrastructure, they offer flexible solutions that are easily adaptable. This flexibility enabled us to update our IT systems based on changing requirements.

As our business and customer demands grew, especially with the expansion of our digital services and our mobile app’s ongoing development, we knew HPE could deliver the reliable, scalable infrastructure needed for critical financial applications.

Composable infrastructure  improves business continuity and data resiliency

We started our HPE journey with bare metal servers and moved on to converged and hyperconverged infrastructure when those technologies became available. We continue to use our HPE HC380 virtualization platform for legacy and low-power applications, including VDIs for our remote workforce. It is an incredibly secure and extremely efficient platform to provision and manage applications that demand minimal resources, like employee work environments.

The core of our current infrastructure are HPE Synergy and HPE Alletra Storage systems. HPE Synergy enables us to manage compute, storage, and networking resources flexibly and efficiently. Our engineers can quickly provision infrastructure, scaling our resources as needed instead of tying up our budgets by overprovisioning in advance or struggling to make adjustments afterward. Consequently, HPE Synergy reduces the time and effort required to deploy and scale services while lowering our IT spending.

Additionally, the HPE Alletra 9000 storage system delivers ultra-low latency and high availability, both of which are essential to our mission-critical workloads. Another key benefit of Alletra is how it facilitates high-availability storage across multiple data centers, including our primary and backup sites, ensuring business continuity and data resiliency in the event of an outage at one of our facilities.

If part of our infrastructure goes down, we fail over to a recovery site without interrupting our internal or customer-facing systems. As a result, app users continue to enjoy a trouble-free mobile experience regardless of what happens on the backend.

Integrations make all the difference

HPE systems also work well with other solutions in our ecosystem. The financial sector is highly regulated. The National Bank of Georgia requires private banks like ours to host some of our data and services on-prem in addition to their deployment on public cloud providers.

HPE perfectly integrates with our local third-party cloud vendors and our international provider in Frankfurt. It’s another reason why HPE continues to be our primary hardware partner. We can rely on them to engineer solutions that seamlessly integrate with our other technologies, allowing us to mix and match components that give us the best possible performance while fully complying with government mandates.

Seamless, secure, world-leading digital banking

Over our two-decade partnership, HPE has been instrumental in helping us transform our IT infrastructure to enhance our digital banking services. It has enabled us to respond swiftly to market changes and evolving customer needs, ensuring a seamless and secure banking experience.

I’m excited about the future of our partnership with HPE and the opportunity to continue evolving together as technology advances. Our partnership with HPE enables us to leverage their innovation, technologies, and industry expertise to support our mission of providing reliable and efficient banking services to our customers. They’ve consistently demonstrated an ability to innovate and adapt to our changing business needs. We are confident in the company’s ability to support our long-term IT strategy as we continue to modernize our infrastructure, embrace automation, and explore new technologies like AI and edge computing.

Reflecting on our journey with HPE, I am proud that our digital transformation has positioned Bank of Georgia as a globally recognized leader in digital banking. In October 2024, we were named the World’s Best Digital Bank by Global Finance Magazine. This accolade proves the success of our digital initiatives and our ability to meet the needs of our growing customer base.

In financial services, performance, security, and uptime are non-negotiable. HPE has helped us provide our customers with a seamless and secure digital banking experience, empowering us to better serve Georgians as they manage their money.