Wednesday 20 May 2020
NewB, the new Belgian cooperative bank that obtained its banking licenses in January of this year, has signed a five-year contract with the Belgian IT service provider NRB for the outsourcing of its ICT systems.
NewB profiles itself as a financial institution that stands for ethical and sustainable banking. In 2011, 24 organisations set up NewB as a European Cooperative Society (ECS). In the following years, they started looking for shareholders and in 2019 additional money was raised with a view to obtaining a banking license. The shareholders were addressed, as well as the general public, through an ethically explicit campaign. Today NewB has 116,000 shareholders: individuals alongside public and other organisations that also joined the new bank.
On 21 January 2020, NewB received its license from the National Bank of Belgium and on 31 January from the European Central Bank.
NewB has signed a five-year contract with NRB for the outsourcing of its ICT platform. NRB is responsible for the entire ICT infrastructure of the new bank, which will be offered in an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) mode. Mainsys, a Belgian specialist developer of core banking applications, will supply the banking software. The architecture of the IaaS platform has been designed and set up by NRB on its own multi-cloud platform, known under the brand name NECS (NRB Enterprise Cloud Services). NRB is also responsible for the permanent monitoring of the availability and operational management, not only of the bank's production environment, but also of the pre-production and test environments.
As a brand-new Belgian bank, NewB, like all financial institutions, is subject to a regulatory framework of, among others, the FSMA and the National Bank of Belgium. NRB has brought its services to the bank fully in line with these legal and security requirements. Moreover, NewB is the first banking institution in Belgium to have the IT for its core activities managed by an external partner.
An article on datanews.be preceding the publication of an interview with CIO Yves Konen of NewB in the magazine Data News of the 5th of June, contains the following explanation by Mr. Konen on the choice for NRB: "One of the important criteria for NewB was that the hosting and the data should remain as much as possible in Belgium. We wanted to work with a local player but who had to be a reliable and experienced player as well. From the first discussions about the future infrastructure, NRB has always been very professional. The very detailed technical offer and the service catalogues dis offered have brought a lot of clarity to the expectations about the future relationship and have convinced us of NRB's professionalism. ”
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