Elly Yates-Roberts |
Banco Millennium Atlântico (BMA) in Angola has transformed banking in the country by migrating to Microsoft Azure. The cloud platform has enabled the bank to improve processes and strengthen security.
BMA had previously bucked Angolan trends of resisting technological evolution due to security concerns by becoming the first national bank in Angola to offer mobile banking services. Cloud migration was its next step towards digitalisation. It recognised the cloud’s value in storing data and applications and enabling it to meet future market needs. As such, it turned to Microsoft in the hopes of increasing its speed and agility in serving customers.
“Microsoft has many technological solutions under one roof in the form of Microsoft 365, which would help drive our digital strategy,” said Osvaldo Manuel, cloud specialist at BMA. “We had confidence that it was the right solution to support our journey towards continuous modernisation and move to cloud-based systems.”
Following its move to Microsoft Azure, BMA also began using Microsoft solutions internally, including Teams, Azure Active Directory and Exchange.
“Today we have the entire Exchange environment in the cloud,” said Manuel. “We are planning to discontinue local servers, which were deprecated anyway. We’ve also adopted Azure Information Protection, which is crucial for classifying, labelling and protecting our client's sensitive documents and our emails. At the same time, we started to implement Azure Kubernetes Service to gain the ability to quickly develop and deploy apps.”
According to Manuel, Microsoft technologies have transformed the bank’s internal processes. “Today, we have a more collaborative environment,” he said. “A single file can be shared with both internal and external stakeholders, by applying access controls, including time limits on file access, and security measures. We are saving a significant amount of time on processes such as editing, document sharing, and adding security criteria. All of this ultimately impacts the satisfaction levels of our end-users – our customers. It's just fantastic.”