FIS wanted to mitigate business exposure and reduce the risk of service outages through continued improvements in the speed, resiliency and availability of services.

The main objective of the partnership was creating synergy between FIS's strength in applications and outsourced operations and the strong IT infrastructure technology and management prowess of IBM. The partnership consistently achieves high ratings for client satisfaction, thanks to superior client management and services, and consistent service delivery.

FIS is a leader in financial services technology, providing card processing solutions and services to a number of large financial institutions in Australia . IT infrastructure, capacity and services are the critical foundation of FIS services, ensuring their clients complex financial processing is ‘always on’.

FIS wanted to mitigate business exposure and reduce the risk of service outages through continued improvements in the speed, resiliency and availability of services. This required a strategic technology partner for the delivery, management and support of the entire IT infrastructure, including disaster recovery, with the experience to support FIS's rapidly growing business.

The partnership between FIS and IBM began in 2000 with a large global outsourcing contract which required FIS to provide card processing services in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Ireland. FIS based the card system on the IBM Z server platform for core processing. They chose IBM to supply the mainframe processing capabilities to execute the contract—forming a strong relationship that now spans almost 20 years.

These services are high value and critical to the operational business of FIS and fundamental to the outsourcing relationships and contracts with their clients. IBM was the only partner that could perform the critical role in planning, testing and migration services for the new infrastructure in conjunction with the FIS application and support teams.

“We have a long-term partnership with IBM that has been extremely successful over the last 20 years. IBM are second-to-none in the mainframe services area and they were the logical choice with whom to engage for this project.” Anita LeMaire, FIS

FIS worked with IBM to ensure exceptional scalability, reliability and business continuity for their cards system infrastructure. The FIS cards system, BASE Global, has an extensive inventory of configurable components shared across all product lines to support cards products. This unique design ensures operating efficiency while dramatically accelerating the time to market of new products and services.

With almost 20 years of engagement, IBM has helped FIS migrate to two new Tier 3/4 data centres and implemented new mainframe, storage, fibre network connectivity and virtual tape technology into these sites. They migrated and tested all data, production and development workloads, and seamlessly cut over the production environments without client impact. Recovery on IBM Z enabled FIS to re-establish critical services to the alternate site within minutes, as the core infrastructure was designed to rapidly resume mission-critical functions. The data centre relocation with upgraded infrastructure allows FIS to switch production between the two data centre locations on scheduled dates to reduce downtime and mitigate risk for disaster recovery. IBM also ensures that the infrastructure meets critical audit requirements including PCI DSS, ISO22301, ISO27001 and ASAE3402.

Often referred as one of the world’s most sophisticated business servers, the IBM Z delivers mixed workload integration, high-transaction processing and data serving, providing enriched functions for the on-demand operating environment.

The main objective of the partnership was creating synergy between FIS's strength in applications and outsourced operations and the strong IT infrastructure technology and management prowess of IBM. The partnership consistently achieves high ratings for client satisfaction, thanks to superior client management and services, and consistent service delivery. As FIS’s partner of choice, the IBM team is integrated on-site and able to take the pulse of their business.

Resilience, reliability and scalability—The partnership between FIS and IBM resulted in significant uplift in resiliency capabilities, including the ability to execute a site switch from one data centre to another. This process can be achieved with no impact to operations and has eliminated the need for regular and labor intensive disaster recovery testing. It has ensured a highly resilient core infrastructure, and improved operational efficiency and data protection. FIS is able to mitigate risks and minimize downtime to deliver ‘always on’ financial processing services for their clients.

Fidelity National Information Services, Inc. (FIS) (link resides outside of ibm.com) is a leader in technology and services that helps businesses and communities thrive by advancing commerce and the financial world.

For over 50 years, FIS has continued to drive growth for clients around the world by creating tomorrow’s technology, solutions and services to modernize today’s businesses and customer experiences. By connecting merchants, banks and capital markets, we use our scale, apply our deep expertise and data-driven insights, innovate with purpose to solve for our clients’ future, and deliver experiences that are more simple, seamless and secure to advance the way the world pays, banks and invests.

Headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, FIS employs more than 55,000 people across 50+ countries, dedicated to helping our clients be ahead of what’s next. FIS offers more than 450 solutions and processes over USD75b of transactions around the planet. FIS is a Fortune 500® company and is a member of Standard & Poor’s 500® Index.