Like so many industries, automotive engineering today faces far-reaching changes unleashed by everything from electrification and autonomous driving to changes in consumer behavior. The latter also have repercussions for financial institutions in the industry. Why? Because whether they are buying, leasing or sharing a car, consumers nowadays demand more flexible payment options. Market players who want to stay abreast of these changes thus have no choice but to sharpen their focus on digitalization.
Volkswagen Financial Services are showing exactly how this approach can work. To accommodate the more exacting demands of (potential) customers, the company took the decision in 2019 to deploy VMware® Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition (TKGI) and VMware NSX-T. These solutions enabled the largest financial service provider in the mobility industry to make a central portfolio of applications available to fast-growing markets, to tap new lines of business and to reinforce its own position in this sector.
Financial Supervisory Authority’s strict regulations demand top security
Volkswagen Financial Services have placed tremendous confidence in VMware and expect a lot from the solution they have chosen. The provider wanted a platform that is flexible, highly available and extremely secure – a platform that can support all its widely varying application scenarios, including those that are based on container technology. Compliance with very strict regulations in the financial sector was another imperative: The platform had to satisfy all the requirements stipulated by Germany’s Federal Financial Supervisory Authority BaFin. Going forward, it must also constantly remain on the very leading edge of security technology.
Volkswagen Financial Services had already implemented VMware vSphere, so the decision to go with VMware’s TKGI solution too did not take long. The argument that clinched the customer’s choice was the VMware solution’s automation and integration functionality, which leaves Volkswagen Financial Services platform-independent and thus well prepared for the future. The company can thus already reap the rewards of advanced network automation, which vastly simplifies and accelerates the provisioning of applications with the aid of container technology.
Simplified collaboration
“TKGI lets us operate lots of applications at the same time on a standardized platform. And it lets us do so with a small but highly effective team,” explains Marc Miether, Head of Middleware and Container Services at Volkswagen Financial Services. “Now that we are using market standards like containers, it is so much easier to collaborate with the providers of software applications.”
With TKGI now tailored to the company’s IT landscape, the customer can make much more cost-efficient use of the resources at its disposal. At the same time, the system guarantees full protection for all applications – including full compliance with the complex regulatory and governance requirements that apply in the financial space. But Volkswagen Financial Services are not finished yet: The company is now considering sourcing additional infrastructure as a service via a cloud data center in order to drive further growth – and to further strengthen its own position as a leading provider of financial services for mobility solutions.
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