Rackspace Technology spearheads digital transformation

Rackspace Technology says that  BFC Group Holdings (BFC), the leading money transfer and currency exchange provider in the Kingdom of Bahrain, is shifting its core application and supporting systems to Amazon Web Services (AWS). The migration creates a robust platform for BFC to focus on delivering seamless financial services to customers without the complexity of managing and maintaining a vast data centre.

Rackspace Technology has helped BFC migrate its core application and supporting systems to the AWS public cloud while providing ongoing management and consultancy services.

Since installing its first servers 40 years ago, BFC has leveraged technology to maintain its competitive edge in the regional remittance and foreign exchange markets. Over the years, those servers multiplied into fully-fledged, mission-critical data centres supporting the company’s expansion to 46,000 pay-out agents in over 30 countries worldwide and — more recently — its growing online operations.

But anticipating the shift away from brick-and-mortar branches towards greater digitisation, BFC embarked on a redevelopment of its core business application.

“With the continued evolution of smartphones and computers, our business is evolving from the traditional brick and mortar to a digital model. Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, our goal is to cross over more decisively into the digital space by modernising our core application to better support both a digital and physical presence. This will help accelerate our digital innovation,” said Ebrahim Nonoo, the Managing Director and CEO of BFC Group Holding Company.

“We selected Rackspace Technology because they are the best at providing robust technology foundation to companies like ours to achieve our business goals,” Nonoo added.

“Digital transformation is a business imperative for the modern enterprise. By leveraging our global expertise and technology, BFC has maintained its position as the leading money transfer service in the region while improving the customer experience. The scalability of public cloud means BFC can easily expand across boundaries with a consistent level of service no matter the country,” said George Pawlyszyn, General Manager, Middle East and Africa, Rackspace Technology.

Before completing the migration, BFC saw an immediate uplift in critical performance measures, such as transactions processed per second (TPS) and customer experience. Resiliency in the system has improved, and uptime has increased to 99.99% compared to 99.95% with its on-premises environment.

The strategic migration has also eliminated the hassle and expense of managing in-house data centres, enabling BFC to invest more resources into innovation and service improvements.

“As we redeveloped our application, our on-premises environment struggled to provide the performance required,” said Ali Fakhreddine, CIO at BFC. “We didn’t want to invest in refreshing the infrastructure and all what that entails because we know that is not where the future lies. So, we brought forward our plans to move to the cloud.”