Helsinki-based fintech company Asiakastieto Group is using Red Hat solutions to build its new account information service, Account Insight, on an open banking platform. The firm uses Red Hat OpenShift for faster time to market and Red Hat Integration to centrally manage data sharing with business customers to deliver the most relevant, timely offerings to end consumers.

With the introduction of the European Union revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2), Asiakastieto identified an opportunity with its customers to analyze data from bank accounts to better understand the liquidity and cash flow of loan applicants. Its vision was to help reduce loan repayment defaults and personal debt.

To keep down costs for its customers, Asiakastieto said it looked for scalable technology with advanced automation capabilities and high availability and chose Red Hat OpenShift as its foundation for containerized applications.

To run modern, cloud-native applications with freedom of choice in technology, Asiakastieto implemented an open microservices architecture with the help of tools and frameworks from Red Hat Runtimes. Red Hat 3scale API Management provided Asiakastieto with a centralised, more secure interface to connect banks and credit grantors and to enable test and launch of changes via configuration, removing the need to build and redeploy code, which was disruptive to business.

The Asiakastieto team worked closely with Red Hat to adopt a best practice implementation of Red Hat open source technologies for the new Account Insight solution to accelerate time-to-value for the business. This includes the introduction of Quarkus, which has enabled faster application development and developer productivity on Red Hat OpenShift thanks to significant reduction in resource utilization.

Asiakastieto said it plans to expand its use of Red Hat OpenShift to power future innovation for credit assessment and other new services using big data analytics for business customers and consumers, and to scale geographically to cover more of the EU.