ABN AMRO engages Kyndryl and IBM to help modernize its IT Operating Model to enable Public Cloud, Agile and DevOps in pursuit of its strategy to become a personal bank in the digital age

AMSTERDAM and NEW YORK and ARMONK, N.Y., Oct. 19, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Kyndryl and IBM today announced an agreement with ABN AMRO, a 420 million Euro deal that builds upon their long-standing services relationship for the management of the bank's hybrid cloud infrastructure, supporting its domestic and international operations through the end of 2029. Based in the Netherlands, ABN AMRO serves retail, private and corporate banking customers in Northern Europe with loans, mortgages and other banking solutions. 

This innovative agreement is intended to enable the bank to transform and modernize its IT operating model. The goal is to have a more responsive and client centric way of working to help towards a faster, flatter, more focused, more flexible and provide more degrees of freedom. This can help ABN AMRO to realize its goal of developing and delivering more personal services to its customers in the digital age.

The transformation includes:

• The integration of the Kyndryl team with the ABN AMRO team to implement a single services delivery model This will have the goal of helping to eliminate the duplication and management of overhead.
• Alignment of these jointly provided services to the bank-owned strategic platforms with SaaS, Azure*, mainframe, and on-premises private cloud services.
• The implementation of a single set of tooling and consistent processes used by Kyndryl and ABN AMRO and across all platforms.
• Convergence of current on-premises platforms to a single private cloud, helping to eliminate duplication and provide enhanced services for consumers.
• Further modernization of the mainframe platform, building on industry best practices, including enablement of DevOps and CI/CD.
• Modernization of middleware through the deployment of IBM Cloud Paks.

IBM will supply IBM Z hardware and software, including IBM Cloud Pak for Data, IBM Cloud Pak for Integration and WebSphere Hybrid Edition to help accelerate the journey to hybrid cloud. By shifting from traditional licenses towards IBM Cloud Paks, ABN AMRO can benefit from the flexibility to run existing workloads on both on-premises and public cloud platforms enabling a faster pace with the journey to cloud.

"This agreement is core to achieving our IT operating model goals for the current decade. ABN AMRO will re-take end-to-end control and responsibility for platform services while maintaining close support from essential, embedded capabilities provided by Kyndryl. More parties in the complex ecosystem will have controlled access to production environments enabling true multi-party Agile and DevOps. We will integrate the teams into a single service delivery model in order to ensure speed, flexibility and consistency for our consumer community," said Jan van Groningen, ABN AMRO Chief Technology Officer. "We are pleased to continue a productive and successful collaboration with IBM and Kyndryl moving forward."

"ABN AMRO has been a key IBM client for decades," said Marcell Schmidt, Technology Leader for IBM Netherlands. "We look forward to a continued close relationship, collaborating with Kyndryl, enabling the modernization of existing applications and new solutions powering ABN AMRO's platforms."

"We are delighted with ABN AMRO's engagement of Kyndryl and look forward to continuing the transformation of the services we provide to the bank," said Jonathan Ingram, Kyndryl Managing Partner for ABN AMRO. "This approach can enable clients to fully adopt DevOps while maintaining the security, resilience and high availability services that Kyndryl prides itself on."

IBM and ABN AMRO signed their hybrid cloud infrastructure transformation agreement in June 2021 (IBM's second quarter 2021).

*Azure is a trademark of the Microsoft group of companies.

About ABN AMRO
ABN AMRO is one of the Netherlands' leading banks. We create value for our stakeholders by providing individuals and businesses with banking services such as loans, mortgages, payments, savings, advice and asset management. Our focus is on Northwest Europe, with over 19,000 ABN AMRO employees worldwide. Outside the Netherlands, ABN AMRO has offices in 13 countries. Our vision is to be a personal bank in the digital age, serving clients where we have scale in the Netherlands and Northwest Europe.
For more information, visit: www.abnamro.com

About Kyndryl
Kyndryl is the new independent public company that will be created following the separation of IBM's Managed Infrastructure Services business, expected to occur by the end of 2021.  Kyndryl designs, builds, manages and modernizes the mission-critical technology systems that the world depends on every day, with the industry's most experienced services experts.
For more information, visit www.kyndryl.com

About IBM
For more information on IBM, visit www.ibm.com

Contacts

Ed Barbini
[email protected]

Lia Davis
[email protected]

SOURCE Kyndryl