Virgin Money is a financial services brand used by three independent brand
licensees in the United Kingdom, Australia and South Africa. Virgin Money UK
offers savings, mortgages, credit cards, current accounts, currency services,
pensions, investments and protection products to over three million customers
across the country.
Banking in the UK has traditionally been an old-school industry, slow to change
and marked by entrenched business practices and stable competition. Virgin
Money is pursuing a plan to buck this system. The bank says it is aiming to
transform banking the same way successful technology platform businesses
like eBay, Facebook and Spotify have evolved their industries.
The new venture, known as Virgin Money Digital Bank (VMDB), will leverage
real-time, deep analysis of data to create a customer-centric, digitally enabled
service. The service aims to “re-imagine the basics of banking” by delivering
new, on-demand, targeted services based on real-time insights it derives from
customer data. Services will include universal accounts, money pools and dig-
ital assistance. Plans call for a 2019 rollout with 200,000 customer sign-ups in
the first year, and one million by 2024.
Demonstrating What the Cloud Can Do
To create the VMDB, Virgin Money needed to prove that the cloud could handle
the large volumes of data necessary to enable their services . The bank engaged
Cloud Technology Partners (CTP) to study the issue, create proofs of concept
(PoCs) for an analytics and big data platform, and partner on a project to build
out the cloud and data platforms.
Could the cloud handle all the demands? And could the bank stand up a new
cloud environment in time to meet the aggressive rollout goal?
VMDB brought in CTP for a series of engagements to help answer these ques-
tions, starting with the build-out of a Minimum Viable Cloud (MVC).
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