The last several years have brought drastic increases in regulations and requirements in the banking and financial services industry. As the world becomes increasingly virtual and digital, governing bodies are working double time to make sure that financial data stays as safe as possible.
In the European Union (EU), regulations are particularly stringent. For example, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) sets strict parameters around the transfer of data outside of the EU.
GEVA Group is a payment processing company based in Germany. As such, GEVA must pay close attention to current regulations. Its customers include banks, insurance companies and financial service institutions—companies that must process sensitive financial transactions, but whose primary focus is not IT. For years, GEVA provided these organizations with payment solutions that ran on their internal infrastructures, thereby allowing them to focus on their core businesses.
However, GDPR and other regulations have made it increasingly difficult for GEVA’s customers to maintain compliant infrastructures in the financial services sector. As a result, many of them asked GEVA to provide a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, hosted on the cloud.
Period of doing business
Time doing business in Germany and beyond is 38 years
Transactions at scale
Time to process millions of transactions is 1 hour during quarterly surges
GEVA knew from the very beginning that it would work with IBM Cloud®. “We have a very long history with IBM, and their strong support of the financial services industry has resulted in an excellent reputation among our customers,” says Matthias Fauth, Service Manager at GEVA. “Furthermore, IBM Cloud technology is designed to help companies like GEVA meet our industry’s many requirements.”
In the payment processing industry, timelines can be rather tight. Most banks have very short payment processing windows. If you miss one, you may have to wait hours or days for the next window—a situation that can have devastating effects in GEVA’s fast-paced industry.
This means that the infrastructure that underlies GEVA’s applications must be extremely stable. As one of the few public cloud providers with numerous data centers in Europe, including in Frankfurt, London and Amsterdam, IBM provides GEVA with extraordinary failover support.
GEVA further bolstered the security and stability of its SaaS infrastructure by selecting IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers to support its Oracle database. Geographically dispersed bare metal servers can be set up in synchronous mode so that if the database fails on one server, another will pick up where it left off with no loss of data.
Another key component of GEVA’s IBM Cloud infrastructure, IBM Cloud Object Storage, facilitates data content storage for applications and backup across GEVA’s worldwide data center regions. IBM Cloud Object Storage also enables GEVA to keep all of the data exchanged between customers and the cloud redundant. The importance of this configuration—designed to support the reliable continuation of service—cannot be understated. GEVA’s is a mission critical business, and any loss of data would equal time and revenue lost.
GEVA’s environment is not limited to bare metal. IBM Cloud Virtual Servers offer the organization a distinct advantage because they can be scaled on an as-needed basis. This makes it easy to onboard new customers, plus it easily accommodates the activity surges GEVA experiences at quarter-end and year-end, when the organization process millions of transactions per hour.
GEVA’s customers demand the best, which means that the organization cannot risk downtime or outages. “We chose IBM as our cloud provider because we knew that we could trust them. We are already in discussions about technology we hope to use in the future,” says Fauth. This includes IBM PostgreSQL Database as a Service.
Fauth concludes: “In the coming years, we also hope to begin offering our customers instant payment capabilities, which will allow us to take advantage of IBM’s expertise in AI and machine learning.”
GEVA Group (link resides outside of ibm.com) is an international company with two main locations in Germany and subsidiaries in Luxembourg and Belgium. It develops and manages innovative software solutions for processing worldwide payment transactions. The company serves banks, public institutions and payment service providers. GEVA has been a household name in the payment services industry for almost 40 years.
GEVA Group solution components:
• SEPA Payments
• TARGET Payments
• Foreign Payments
• Instant Payment
• SWIFT Connectivity
• EBICS Server
• Compliance Solutions
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