Oracle and HSBC, one of the world’s largest financial services organizations, today announced a strategic collaboration to accelerate the bank’s digital transformation.

Under the multi-year agreement, HSBC will upgrade and migrate select database systems to Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer, a cloud platform delivered as a managed infrastructure service in HSBC’s own data centers. The deployment will help support and scale the bank’s mission-critical systems and services.

Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer is an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) service that provides a secure, highly-available cloud platform that enables HSBC to continue to use Oracle databases in support of its critical systems while retaining control of its data governance, thereby meeting data locality and security regulations. The Oracle platform will also enable HSBC to more easily bring cloud automation to manage legacy applications, and easily scale services according to customer and local-market demands.

The collaboration contributes to HSBC’s multi-year initiative to transform its technology infrastructure to speed up the development, delivery and scaling of new products and services; make its products more secure and available; and build digital capabilities and skills across its workforce.

“Our strategy is to digitize the bank at scale, so that we can innovate faster for customers, and our collaboration with Oracle is important in advancing this transformation agenda,” said Frank McGrath, Chief Technology Officer, HSBC. “We chose Exadata Cloud@Customer primarily for its ability to offer well known databases, with the benefit of a database-as-a-service platform, giving us the performance and operational agility we need as we continue to grow and diversify our business.”

“Financial organizations are rapidly adopting new technologies and transforming their operations as they tap into new market opportunities while meeting more demanding data locality and privacy requirements,” said Richard Smith, executive vice president, Technology, EMEA, Oracle. “Our partnership with HSBC is based on achieving this balance, enabling it to consolidate critical systems on a secure, scalable on-premises cloud platform and develop cloud-based services faster. We look forward to our collaboration with HSBC as we help deliver the next generation of financial services.”