Cooperative Bank of Oromia: Building a Digital-Intelligent Infrastructure to Accelerate Smart Finance Adoption

Propelled by the global digital economy surge, fintech innovations are fundamentally restructuring financial ecosystems across Africa. Africa has emerged as a thriving frontier for mobile payments and inclusive finance, with Ethiopia's digital economy drive Ethiopia's national digital strategy orchestrated through its Ministry of Innovation and Technology. Within this transformative landscape, Ethiopian financial institutions are progressively leveraging digital intelligence integration to optimize service delivery channels.

The Cooperative Bank of Oromia (hereafter "COOP Bank"), ranking among Ethiopia's five largest private banking institutions. has cemented its market leadership since 2005 With an extensive network encompassing 700+ physical touchpoints and ATM deployments, the Bank currently services 15 million individual and institutional clients while maintaining strategic alliances with multiple global financial partners.

As COOP Bank's business operations expand, the bank has adopted a digital-first strategy to accelerate its digital-intelligent transformation, placing increasing pressure on its IT infrastructure. To address this, COOP Bank has partnered with Huawei to comprehensively upgrade its IT infrastructure across storage, networking, security, and energy systems, not only supporting the transformation but also driving ongoing business innovation and growth.

Amidst Rapid Digital Transformation, Legacy IT Infrastructure Demands Urgent Modernization

Guided by its digital-first strategy, Cooperative Bank of Oromia has steadily intensified investments in digital-intelligent transformation, driving innovations from software development and system integration to video surveillance and mobile payment solutions. While these technological advancements support expanding business operations, the bank's current IT infrastructure reveals critical optimization requirements to ensure sustainable growth capabilities.

The bank's current storage infrastructure requires optimization in physical footprint and resource utilization efficiency to address escalating data storage demands. Concurrently, evolving transaction volumes and real-time processing requirements reveal performance bottlenecks in storage latency and I/O throughput, necessitating architectural refinements to maximize server compute potential. Furthermore, constrained data center rack capacity demands implementation of high-density storage solutions with elastic scaling capabilities.

The bank's network infrastructure currently operates predominantly through a single data center, presenting architectural optimization opportunities to mitigate risks and accommodate future demands for large-scale elastic scalability. Existing network operation practices require enhancements in efficiency and automation to meet agile service delivery requirements. Seamless interoperability and real-time data synchronization between emerging data centers and legacy systems remain critical for advancing business continuity capabilities.

The bank's branch networks require enhanced cybersecurity capabilities to combat modern threats like malicious website infiltration and DNS-based attacks. Concurrently, surging non-transactional traffic from video conferencing, surveillance systems, and ATM operations necessitates upgraded security protocols for branch network infrastructure. Moreover, heterogeneous network device ecosystems demand centralized management systems at headquarters level to ensure seamless interconnectivity across all branches.

The bank's energy infrastructure requires improved efficiency metrics to reduce operational expenditures. Intelligent management solutions should be deployed to enable real-time system monitoring and AI-driven predictive maintenance. Current data center architectures lack sufficient adaptive capabilities to meet evolving demands from AI and big data workloads. Furthermore, deficiencies in automated operational capabilities—including dynamic resource optimization and failure forecasting—coupled with inadequate disaster recovery mechanisms hinder implementation of cross-data center redundancy with sub-second failover.

To Establish a Future-proof IT Infrastructure Architecture that Empowers Intelligent Business Ecosystems

Data constitutes the core asset of a banking institution, where optimizing storage efficiency, transmission reliability, and cybersecurity protocols fundamentally governs the executability of core banking operations and scalability of digital financial services.

In data storage, Huawei's OceanStor Dorado series all-flash storage system provides COOP Bank with high-performance capabilities through its end-to-end NVMe architecture. The SmartMatrix 3.0 fully interconnected active-active architecture combined with RAID-TP technology effectively addresses data protection requirements to ensure operational stability. Additionally, the system supports intelligent lifecycle management encompassing resource planning, service deployment, system tuning, risk forecasting, and fault diagnosis, enabling COOP Bank to proactively anticipate potential performance bottlenecks and hard disk failures.

Huawei's Galaxy AI High-Resilience Data Center Network solution, centered on CloudEngine switches and the iMaster NCE management platform, leverages AI to upgrade capabilities across "Resilient Deployment, Stable Operation, and Intelligent O&M," delivering ultra-reliable network assurance for COOP Bank's financial services. The dual-active network architecture across data centers enables error-free go-live through network-security collaboration simulation. Exclusive iReliable tri-level fast switching ensures zero-interruption service continuity with millisecond-level failover, while the proprietary network digital map allows operators to pinpoint faults instantly with one-click operation.

Huawei's Galaxy AI-empowered SASE solution combines SD-WAN connectivity, multi-layered security protocols, and secure remote access through a cloud-network-edge-device converged architecture powered by USG6600F/6700F gateways and iMaster NCE orchestration platform. This AI-driven infrastructure achieves unified monitoring, analytical operations, and accelerated deployment cycles with carrier-grade reliability and intelligent maintenance protocols, delivering military-grade protection for COOP Bank's financial operations.

Huawei's FusionModule2000 energy-efficient infrastructure utilizes modular architecture integrating power distribution, thermal control, rack systems, cabling channels, and monitoring components. This unified design ensures operational safety while optimizing space utilization and energy efficiency through simplified installation processes, compatible architecture deployment, intelligent system monitoring, and stable cooling performance. The solution's i3-enabled intelligent micro-modules enhance power and thermal management reliability with AI-coordinated control between electrical and cooling systems, implementing automated asset supervision to maximize data center availability and operational efficiency.

Reinforcing Digital Infrastructure Underpin Capacity to Pioneer Next-generation Intelligent Financial Ecosystems

COOP Bank's strategic deployment of Huawei's converged storage-network-security architecture has enabled full-stack infrastructure modernization, establishing a next-generation digital core that empowers intelligent banking transformation through automated operations and resilient service delivery frameworks.

COOP Bank's implementation of Huawei OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage systems has enhanced storage performance while reducing SAN port requirements, power consumption, cooling needs, and rack space utilization, thereby lowering total storage operational costs.

COOP Bank's deployment of Huawei Galaxy AI-powered Data Center Fabric achieves carrier-grade network resilience through AI-driven cross-scenario capability enhancement, addressing critical data center challenges while enabling intelligent infrastructure operations to support continuous financial service innovation.

COOP Bank's implementation of Huawei Galaxy AI-powered SASE architecture achieves AI-accelerated network provisioning, mission-critical reliability standards, and intelligent threat management through cross-scenario capability convergence, effectively addressing branch network security challenges while ensuring transactional integrity across financial service platforms.

COOP Bank's implementation of Huawei's modular data center solution delivers simplified rack-scale deployment with future-ready expandability. The energy-efficient infrastructure utilizes high-performance UPS systems and thermal control units to minimize operational costs, while intelligent 3D visualization enables centralized monitoring of power distribution and cooling capacity status with real-time alerts, ensuring infrastructure resilience for banking operations.

COOP Bank's strategic ICT collaboration with Huawei accelerates financial technology convergence initiatives, driving transformative economic modernization across Ethiopia. This partnership simultaneously propels Huawei's fintech innovation roadmap through core technology breakthroughs and solution portfolio enhancements, contributing more to global fintech innovation and development.