stc pay Turns to Red Hat OpenShift to Help Unlock Digital Services Innovation

Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that stc pay has chosen Red Hat to help it expand its fintech services. stc pay uses Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, along with Red Hat integration and cloud storage technologies, to enable the portability of applications across any cloud to help accelerate the delivery of innovative applications and features to users.

Launching the wallet of the future

stc pay, a subsidiary of stc Group, was launched in late 2018 with a focus on providing a faster, easier, and more secure customer experience to individuals and business owners, enabling them to send, receive, and manage money seamlessly through their mobile devices. stc pay is already Saudi Arabia’s largest and leading mobile wallet, with 5 million customers.

stc pay recognised the need to be adaptable in order to achieve growth in a dynamic market characterised by ongoing disruption from new entrants, continuous change in consumer behaviour and expectations, and evolving regulatory requirements such as those governing data storage and access. stc pay set out to build a flexible enterprise architecture that would support this business agility, and sought a Kubernetes platform that would enable cloud-native development and a hybrid cloud strategy that includes on-premises, private cloud and public clouds.

Open source leads the way

To meet its goal of becoming a fintech industry pioneer, stc pay wanted a cloud-agnostic platform that would provide abstraction from the underlying hardware and automated provisioning across hybrid infrastructure and found this in Red Hat OpenShift. On OpenShift, stc pay is running Red Hat AMQ, a messaging platform that helps enable real-time integration, and Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage. Red Hat Consulting helps accelerate the implementation with hands-on training to support stc pay teams in embracing agile practices such as DevSecOps.

stc pay engaged Red Hat in the design and build phases of its platform, with close collaboration between the teams to optimise both the tools and the processes as it introduces its API-based microservices architecture. stc pay and Red Hat are also working closely with Temenos, a banking software provider that is relied on by more than 3,000 banks around the globe, to run Temenos Payments, a suite of payment processing solutions, and Temenos Transact, a digital core-banking solution, on OpenShift.

With its OpenShift-based platform that helps streamline application development and scalability, stc pay expects to improve time to market and employee productivity and anticipates an improvement in the availability, uptime and recovery of applications to enhance the user experience. Through continued collaboration with Red Hat, stc pay’s plans for future innovation include growth into new regions using multiple public cloud providers and expanding its work with ecosystem partners to introduce open finance into Saudi Arabia.

Supporting Quotes

Kelly Switt, senior director, Financial Services strategy, ecosystem and strategic partnerships, Red Hat

“stc pay is looking to shake up the financial services market with its digital business model and growth strategy through the stc Group mobile subscriber base, all of which relies on cloud-native agility. Red Hat is excited to collaborate with stc pay as it builds out a hybrid cloud platform from which it can offer more secure and frictionless services to merchants and consumers in the Kingdom and beyond. Our deep relationship with stc pay and Temenos is built on openness, as we are working closely to achieve joint strategic goals, laying a great foundation for long-term success.”

Abdulrahman Almutairi, vice president of Technology, stc pay

“To support our ambitions to be the pioneer in fintech in Saudi Arabia as part of the Kingdom’s Vision 2030, we were looking for best-of-breed robust, scalable, and trusted vendors to ensure a strong risk profile for delivering financial services. We were attracted to Red Hat’s enterprise open source model offering support and security features in combination with access to a global pool of talent for rapid development. With great proactiveness on all sides, we have formed a strong working relationship with Red Hat as with Temenos. We are excited to be building a hybrid cloud based on Red Hat OpenShift to power next-generation digital technologies that will help us bring innovative experiences to users while enabling greater financial inclusion in the region and closing gaps in fintech services and digital payments.”