SeABank: Enhancing customer experiences in the cloud
About SeABank
Established in 1994, Southeast Asia Commercial Joint Stock Bank (SeABank) is a joint stock commercial bank in Vietnam that provides banking products and services to consumers, small businesses, and large corporations. Its vision is to become the leading bank in the country by delivering a full and diversified portfolio of financial products and services.
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About Cloud Ace
Cloud Ace has been Google Cloud Partner of the Year for five consecutive years, providing one-stop support from cloud implementation design to operation and maintenance. It is also a Google Maps and Authorized Training partner. As a Google Cloud managed service provider, Cloud Ace offers technical support in all areas of application development and machine learning, as well as consulting, system development for more than 120 customers, and Google Cloud certified training.
Southeast Asia Commercial Joint Stock Bank (SeABank) has experienced rapid growth, particularly during the COVID-19 lockdowns. But the increased traffic, as well as its legacy on-premise infrastructure, has led to slower performance in its websites and applications. By migrating its on-premise infrastructure to a hybrid model on Google Cloud, the bank can scale its resources to traffic and workload demands promptly. At the same time, users can also gain access to websites and applications more quickly than before with minimal delays.
Google Cloud results
- Optimize total cost of operations through the cloud, which allowed the bank to scale its resources according to traffic and workload demands
- Enhance the customer experience by thoroughly analyzing its customer data and understanding its insights
- Modernize applications with a container platformer, while enhancing hybrid connectivity
- Secure the hybrid infrastructure against denial of service and web attacks
Optimize total cost of operations with SeABank scaling its resources promptly to traffic and workload demands
For Southeast Asia Commercial Joint Stock Bank (SeABank), digital transformation is key to its mission of serving its diverse customer base, from individual households to large corporations, through delivering a comprehensive range of financial products and services. This is partly why SeABank has seen immense growth in recent years. In 2022, the bank had nearly one million new e-bank users.
The bulk of the bank's digital strategy is in optimizing its operations through technologies, such as automation, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and business intelligence. One of its first steps is to replace tedious, manual routines with automation, with the additional time and resources being devoted to more critical tasks. It has also developed several digital tools to facilitate its banking activities and services, such as SeAOffice, an application for facilitating remote working for its employees, and SeATeller Project, a software that helps bank tellers identify their customers and retrieve their information automatically and quickly.
While these have helped its employees be more productive, these efforts are also in line with its vision to provide excellent services for its customers.
"With our motto of "customer is the center," SeABank has come up with many solutions to increase customer experience such as diversifying products, improving the quality of service, optimizing processes, shortening transaction time, and digitizing banking operations," says Nguyen Tuan Cuong, Deputy General Director of SeABank.
To address the challenges that stemmed from its growth, SeABank turned to Google Cloud to migrate its infrastructure and adopt a hybrid cloud approach.
Keeping up with rapid growth with a trusted partner
SeABank saw rapid growth in the number of customers and transactions during the COVID-19 lockdowns, but transaction time is longer without a corresponding increase in resources to oversee them. SeABank also has to deal with limited capacity on its on-premise infrastructure, which encumbered its performance and pace of innovation. For instance, the performance of its mobile banking applications have slowed down, which has led to the bank losing customers. Access to its e-banking system is also sluggish, since the on-premise infrastructure cannot be scaled to meet the heavier workload.
With these in mind, the bank worked with Google Cloud to shift its e-banking system to the Google Cloud, so as to accommodate the surge of new users without compromising on platform availability. "Google Cloud is helping to accelerate our ability to digitally transform our business, which will increase our competitiveness in the market, boost efficiency and customer satisfaction, and strengthen the bank's overall business performance," says Tuan Cuong.
Personalizing the customer experience for growth
As part of its digital strategy, SeABank is looking to expand its customer base to 10 million by 2025 and deliver a hyper-personalized customer experience. "It's really important to us that we build a sustainable technology solution which is compatible with our five-year business strategy," says Tuan Cuong.
"Google Cloud is helping to accelerate our ability to digitally transform our business, which will increase our competitiveness in the market, boost efficiency and customer satisfaction, and strengthen the bank's overall business performance."
—Nguyen Tuan Cuong, Deputy General Director, SeABankThis process began in 2021, with several training programs being conducted for SeABank executives and employees to familiarize them with the migration journey. Since a lift-and-shift approach to migration will not be feasible with the bank's on-premise infrastructure, a detailed plan for migration was also prepared. This consisted of four distinct phases, namely, access, plan, deploy, and optimize.
Beyond just migration alone, SeABank also wanted to enhance the customer experience on its mobile applications. It tapped BigQuery to query its raw customer data in its data warehouse, while leveraging both AI and ML to analyze the data in its applications. "With Vertex AI, SeABank could build, deploy and scale our machine learning models more quickly, and draw on predictive analytics to develop new, personalized features and services that would help our customers improve their financial well being. Moreover, these insights also allowed us to hone our business strategy and remain competitive," says Tuan Cuong.
As part of its enhanced security measures, SeABank is relying on Google Cloud Armor to protect its applications and websites against denial of service and web attacks. Cloud Load Balancing was set up to manage increases in traffic and reduce cost through autoscaling, thus significantly reducing resources devoted to security testing. The prior on-premise firewall, too, was also replaced by the web-application firewall (WAF) capabilities of Google Cloud Armor, with firewall policy rules being customizable with advanced match conditions to accurately filter incoming traffic. Moreover, Security Command Center (SCC) enables SeABank to access and detect threats and vulnerabilities, such as data exfiltration and compromised identities. This is to improve and manage risks, such that it's in line with customer policies as well as its five-year strategy.
Finally, SeABank leveraged Anthos and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to modernize its applications within a container platform. In particular, GKE was used to deploy, scale, and manage its containerized applications, with Anthos allowing SeABank to connect its cloud resources with its on-premise infrastructure and easing its multi-cloud deployments. The company also used Apigee to build, manage, and secure APIs within the on-premise environment of SeABank.
"Digital transformation is really a long journey, and we know that we need partners with the expertise to consult us on an effective cloud strategy. In particular, those with the skills, certification and especially experience in deployment are key to our digital strategy success," says Tuan Cuong.
Scaling its resources with ease
Introducing Google Cloud and transforming the on-premise infrastructure to a hybrid model has allowed SeABank to not only enhance the digital and mobile banking experience, but also improved its operations tremendously.
"With Vertex AI, SeABank could build, deploy and scale our machine learning models more quickly, and draw on predictive analytics to develop new, personalized features and services that would help our customers improve their financial well being. Moreover, these insights also allowed us to hone our business strategy and remain competitive."
—Nguyen Tuan Cuong, Deputy General Director, SeABankThrough Google Cloud tools, the company was able to optimize its TCO, as SeABank could scale its resources up and down promptly, according to the amount of traffic it receives and workload demands. This means that the bank can also readily deploy new services and applications due to the additional resources. At the same time, users can also gain access to its website and applications faster than before, without experiencing any delays. Moreover, SeABank also enhanced its security due to Cloud Armor, with the frequency of denial of services and web attacks significantly reduced.
Using cloud solutions is one of the crucial steps for SeABank to maximize the benefits of cutting-edge infrastructure along with the speed and scalability capabilities of AI while optimizing its capacity to deploy customer-centric products and services. With Google Cloud's products and expertise in the field, SeABank can better process and leverage vast amounts of data while still ensuring strict security standards, all the while building rapid, scalable, and sustainable solutions.
"With the support of Google Cloud, we aim to prioritize enhancing the application of machine learning technologies, stream analytics, and business intelligence in data collection and analysis. All of this is for us to gain a deeper understanding of customer needs and strive to improve their experience."
—Nguyen Tuan Cuong, Deputy General Director, SeABank"With the support of Google Cloud, we aim to prioritize enhancing the application of machine learning technologies, stream analytics, and business intelligence in data collection and analysis. All of this is for us to gain a deeper understanding of customer needs and strive to improve their experience," said Tuan Cuong.
With the success of the migration, SeABank is planning to further improve the quality of its products and services, while expanding its IT infrastructure and ensuring business continuity with new technologies. For a start, it will develop new mobile applications that can aid staff productivity and enhance customer support. AI will also be implemented in its sales tools to deliver personalized recommendations. These technological strategies will help SeABank continue to make significant breakthroughs, increase digitization in its operations and products in the coming time, and enhance the customer experience.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About SeABank
Established in 1994, Southeast Asia Commercial Joint Stock Bank (SeABank) is a joint stock commercial bank in Vietnam that provides banking products and services to consumers, small businesses, and large corporations. Its vision is to become the leading bank in the country by delivering a full and diversified portfolio of financial products and services.
About Cloud Ace
Cloud Ace has been Google Cloud Partner of the Year for five consecutive years, providing one-stop support from cloud implementation design to operation and maintenance. It is also a Google Maps and Authorized Training partner. As a Google Cloud managed service provider, Cloud Ace offers technical support in all areas of application development and machine learning, as well as consulting, system development for more than 120 customers, and Google Cloud certified training.