Orange Bank wins the mastery of its SI with ippon and aws

Launched in November 2017, Orange Bank is a digital bank created by the Orange telephone operator, jointly with the Groupama insurance company. Clearly surfing on the wave of mobility and accessibility, Orange Bank aims at a target of 2 million customers by 2025, in France and abroad, based in particular on its large network of agencies already in place To seduce a new audience.

Orange Bank: Opinion and analysis of the online offer

Launched in November 2017, Orange Bank is a digital bank created by the Orange telephone operator, jointly with the Groupama insurance company. Clearly surfing on the wave of mobility and accessibility, Orange Bank aims at a target of 2 million customers by 2025, in France and abroad, based in particular on its large network of agencies already in place To seduce a new audience.

September 2023: Closing next Orange Bank

New Orange Bank offers

On April 22, 2016, Orange and Groupama signed a first agreement to develop an online bank. It was done with the launch of Orange Bank, November 2, 2017. Since then, the development of this online accessible financial structure has multiplied. 140 million euros were thus invested in improving the experience of Orange Bank customers, and making them benefit from new innovations.

In this context, the end of 2020 is marked by the arrival of three offers:

• A standard Orange Bank card,
• A premium card,
• A premium pack.

What are the Orange Bank services ?

Orange Bank offers a catalog of services similar to that of traditional banks: checkbook, authorized discovered, savings book, consumer credit, insurance, etc

All these products open very easily, just a few clicks. The savings book is available free of charge and without ceiling. The personal loan offers an attractive fixed TAEg and without case costs.

The Orange Bank bank card is immediate or delayed depending on the chosen offer. This is a MasterCard card allowing contactless payment, and with a look similar to that of the famous orange Mobicarte.

What are the prices of the Orange Bank account ?

These new services have been accessible to Orange Bank since November 19, 2020. The standard Orange Bank card is free, provided you make at least one payment or withdrawal per month. The Premium card, on the other hand, costs only € 4.99 per month for six months, then € 7.99 per month. Finally, the premium pack is accessible at € 9.99 per month for the first six months, before going to € 12.99 per month.

Through these new offers, Orange Bank further strengthens its desire for innovation and its proximity to French families, almost half of which are already Orange customers.

The opening of an Orange Bank account

To quickly increase its number of customers, Orange Bank offers an attractive welcome offer (excluding standard card):

• 50 € offered for new customers with use of the bank card,
• € 50 additional for the domiciliation of a levy.

Orange Bank does not require any minimum income and registration lasts only about thirty minutes. The latter can be done in agency, on the Orange Bank site or directly from the mobile application.

Orange Bank bank cards

Orange Bank online banking cards are developed in partnership with Mastercard and offer digital innovations.

The standard card:

This standard Orange Bank card is Free without income conditions . It is an immediate debit mastercard usable all over the world. It is practical because the balance balance is instantly adjusted to your application to each payment. You must make 1 payment or withdrawal per month to keep free, otherwise € 2 monthly costs apply.

The Premium card:

The Orange Bank Premium card provides additional services for € 7.99 per month . This mastercard is offered in immediate or delayed debit, and has insurance and assistance equivalent to a Mastercard Gold. This offer is to be prioritized for travelers since payments and withdrawals are free all over the world.

The Premium Pack, developed for families

With the Premium pack, all Orange Bank parents with a premium card have the possibility of creating an account for their children, from 10 years old. This allows them to pay them their pocket money, while promoting the autonomy of the youngest, by offering them to hold their own card and application. Of course, the parent maintains control over this bank account and the use made of the card. He has the opportunity to configure everything in an evolutionary and personal way, in order to have no unpleasant surprises. Children, on the other hand, can even create a virtual piggy bank, to learn to put money aside.

Also note that, as part of the Premium pack, children benefit from the premium advantages of their parents, and in particular insurance covering their purchases or their trips.

New uses accessible from its application:

• Modification of the card code at any time;
• A stronger and stronger and secure authentication of payments on the Internet;
• The possibility of copy and paste your card number to simplify your online purchases;
• The evolution of the account balance in real time;
• The immediate blocking and unlocking of the card;
• A complete configuration of means of payment from the application;
• Access to mobile payment means through Apple Pay and Google Pay.

Innovation

Orange Bank, first 100% French mobile bank, focus on simplicity and innovative services to stand out from its competitors. To carry out her strategy, she decided, accompanied by Ippon, AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, to migrate on the Cloud AWS. The key: control of his IS, a homogenization of tools and practices, and the implementation of a DevOps environment. The whole gives him the necessary agility for his future projects, while having gained safe and having limited his resource needs thanks to the managed services.

Our new model offers us both very strong traceability and much greater resilience of services. The number of incidents has been considerably reduced.””

Alexandre Fedi
Lead Finops and Project Manager Officer at Orange Bank

Orange Bank, Orange mobile bank

Orange Bank is the first 100% French mobile bank. Subsidiary of the Orange operator, it relies on simplicity and innovative services to stand out compared to its competitors. The project was originally launched by Groupama, but it was bought by Orange in 2016, to strengthen its banking service offer. “The work began with the infogenant of the Groupama group, a GIE, who works in a rather classic way: V -cycle for projects, ticket system for demand management … to be able to quickly get out of its offer, completely different from What the first entity proposed, Orange decided to rebuild all the IS, “explains Alexandre Fedi, Lead Finops and Project Management Officer at Orange Bank. To meet, in desired times, to development, build, service and agility needs, Orange Bank has set up development, integration, etc. environments, etc., with technologies completely different from those used in the GIE.

An essential migration to have control of his SI

The teams first worked with the GIE to deliver these new environments in production. But by passing their hand, technology changed (in terms of hosting, CI/CD tools, monitoring, etc.) as well as the organization: the teams no longer had access to machines or tools. “This actually created a break in our Delivery chain, which caused several problems, including long -term deadlines to put the different versions into production, and the late discovery of problems, sometimes even in production or preproduction, which we had very Shortly to resolve … “describes Fedi.

Very quickly, Orange Bank then plans a migration to the cloud to remedy all these difficulties encountered and ensure the continuity of the Delivery chain from start to finish, homogenize the tools … “We pursued several objectives. We wanted to optimize the time to market; improve the reliability and availability of the application; And we also wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to go in the cloud to rely on managed services and refocus on our business. We are a small structure, and we were not intended to create professions within the bank to manage the IT, “explains FEDI.

AWS and Ippon, the right partners

The changes were large. “It was not just a migration,” said Damien Rollet, Cloud architect and Devops at Ippon. It was a question of rebuilding from zero all the Si d’Orange Bank, with tools, monitoring, security … “. The infrastructure thus went from virtual machines with dedicated servers to accommodate Java applications to containerized environments in Kubernetes with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) “. We have contained almost 80% of our applications, to have more resilient applications; But we also wanted to take advantage of the power of the cloud without re-platform, “said Fedi.

Among the other major changes, the databases were migrated from Oracle to PostgreSql on Amazon RDS databases in managed service, with AWS Database Migration Service, “which allowed us not to have to recruit administrators of databases to infote our bases, and to really focus on the software part and delegate the hardware part “, underlines FEDI. A whole cloud base adapted to these new technologies has been implemented, in particular monitoring.

To reliable and control the configuration of infrastructure, Orange Bank has also fully passed into AS Code infrastructure, with a request system of the requests, changes made … “. All this makes it possible to verify the quality of the code which is issued, and to have a repository which is no longer to be documented by hand but which is documented in the code directly, and which well active in production. So that too is a significant change, “said Fedi.

Transform the organization

Migration was carried out in an iterative and modular way, each application being a specific project. To limit developments during migration, application gels were put in place for each asset to avoid edge effects or regressions.

“This allowed us to get our hands on the processes and ride maturity over the water,” said Fedi. Another important point is that in parallel with this overhaul of the IS, Orange Bank also adapted its organization “. There was a real internal transformation, by passing from classic team management to a DevOps spirit, from taking lead of the development teams, describes Rollet. It also prompted us to do the migration gradually, so that the teams can be formed, formed, go up in skills … “. The business teams were thus redistributed in functional and multidisciplinary teams. For example, the concept of Ownership assets has been introduced: each functional team is responsible for an application heritage and network partners, and assumes the build and the run around this perimeter. “To manage one of the main difficulties, the management of skills within the CIO, we have supported AWS a lot to offer training to our employees,” said FEDI. “The help of ippon has been precious to ensure the transition, for example in the implementation of a brand new” platform “team, which manages the whole infrastructure part in the broad sense – REASE, SAFETY, MONITORING, Cloud basement , permissions, etc.””.

Reinforced security

If the migration has been over for some time, there are still some elements of so hosted at the GIE of the Groupama group; But the reversibility phase ends at the end of 2022. And if the precise measurements are not easy to make, the progress made is sensitive. For example, “our new model offers us both very strong traceability and, through containerizations, orchestration on the Kubernetes, etc., much greater resilience of services, “analyzes Fedi. “The number of incidents has been considerably reduced”. Infrastructure costs have also decreased, in particular with the implementation, thanks to Ippon, of good Finops practices from the start of the project. And today, Orange Bank takes full advantage of the catalog of services offered by AWS. “We rely on a lot of AWS services, such as AWS Secrets Manager or ACM, which bring us value and possibilities that we did not have before,” said Fedi. Orange Bank has not finished evolving, and gave it the means.