Many financial institutions remain skeptical of hybrid work. Nedbank isn’t among them. The largest bank in South Africa has gone all in on the new model, announcing that employees whose jobs do not require them to be in a branch office can work from home on a permanent basis if they choose. And it is using solutions from Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CTXS) to provide them with secure and reliable access to everything they need to get work done, wherever it needs to get done.

Bank makes permanent shift to new model, leverages digital workspace solutions to provide secure, reliable access to everything employees need to engage and be productive, wherever they happen to be

The concept of remote work is nothing new for Nedbank. Ten years ago, the forward-thinking institution laid the foundation for it, using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops^™. And it has been building on it ever since.

Delivering the Future of Work Today

“Long before the pandemic, we saw the need to empower our employees to meet an increasingly digital customer base where they are and provide the superior service they have come to expect from us,” said Mervyn Savary, Nedbank’s Executive Head for End User & Communication Services. 

And it turned to Citrix for help. “With Citrix, we can deliver all of the applications and data our team needs to do this anywhere, at any time on any device.”

With Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, Nedbank is able to serve up simple, unified access to the systems, information and tools its 18,000 employees need to engage and be productive and dynamically apply security policies so they can work when, where and how they want with the confidence that their applications, information and devices are safe.

Managing a Distributed Workforce

It can also support more than 2,000 India-based developers who access its data using a BYOD model and trust that they too are protected.

“We can spin up 200 developer users in a day, or two, and it’s not a big issue for us,” Savary said. “We give them access to the desktop image on Citrix. They use their own devices to connect to us, we set them up and they access our data. Then, when they spin down, the data is still sitting in our datacenter intact, and they don’t have anything on their local devices.”

Moving to the Cloud

Regardless of where they are working, employees expect a reliable experience. But like every organization, Nedbank faces challenges in delivering it. 

“The landscape has changed, and we are now leveraging predominantly cloud-based applications across our operations,” said Asokan Moodley, Executive Head of End User & Communication Experience. “As a result, we have seen a drastic increase in bandwidth requirements, and have more latency-sensitive applications that require more resilience, stability and quality than ever.”

To overcome these obstacles, Nedbank again turned to Citrix and it’s SD-WAN solution with built in Palo Alto firewall. And it immediately saw results.

“When we implemented Citrix, our banking platform saw a significant improvement in data turnaround time from 250ms down to 30ms,” Moodley said. 

This has not only helped Nedbank enhance its employee experience, but increase the satisfaction of its clients. “With a faster response time, we can keep our employees connected and engaged and service customers more quickly to enhance their experience. It’s a win-win.”

Nedbank is among hundreds of financial services organizations around the world using Citrix solutions to enable secure remote work. To learn more about the institution’s efforts and the success they are achieving, click here.