Discover announced today that IT consultancy IBM will shift the card provider’s core processes onto a hybrid cloud.

IBM will help Discover automate and scale its digital financial solutions, Amir Arooni, chief information officer at Discover, said in the announcement.

“As we accelerate our digital transition journey as a leading direct bank and payments company, it is critical that we have technology solutions in place that help us improve the customer experience,” Arooni said. “Working with IBM will allow us to automate, react and deliver solutions more quickly, ultimately driving down costs and helping our customers.”

Central to the move is Red Hat OpenShift, a containerization software that adds security, automation and service integrations to the hybrid cloud environment. Discover will also use Red Hat’s Ansible Automation Platform and Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes (ACM) services, along with IBM Garage for the development of new solutions. Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling and management.

HSBC selects IBM for quantum computing

Global banking giant HSBC has selected IBM to increase its quantum computing capabilities, the companies announced Tuesday.

The $2.96 trillion bank will join IBM’s Quantum Accelerator program, which gives the bank access to a range of quantum computing systems. A standout system is Eagle, a 127-qubit processor that offers machine learning optimization and is the largest quantum processor ever built. HSBC will also implement training initiatives and expects to hire quantum computing scientists for its IT taskforce.

Quantum computing “has the potential to transform how we run areas of the bank by addressing challenges which classical computers may never be able to solve,” Colin Bell, chief executive at HSBC Bank plc and HSBC Europe, said in a release. He also called the technology “game changing.”

HSBC’s tech charge has made headlines recently, with the bank announcing both the closure of 69 U.K. branches and a push into the gaming metaverse earlier this month. Tech spend at the bank reached $6 billion in 2021.

Northwoods Credit Union selects Upgrade for digital banking services

Banking fintech Upgrade announced today that it has signed its 100th credit union partnership with the addition of $159 million Northwoods Credit Union.

Upgrade delivers credit, loans and digital banking solutions to consumers and financial institutions. Other credit unions that have selected Upgrade for digital banking include $31 billion Pentagon Federal Credit Union (PenFed), $6.8 billion GreenState Credit Union, and $570 million Pathways Credit Union.

27 banks switch cores to Finastra’s cloud-based platform

Core provider Finastra announced today that 27 existing community bank clients are shifting their core processes to Finastra’s cloud-based Fusion Phoenix platform.

Fusion Phoenix offers open application programming interface (API) integrations and is available on the cloud via Microsoft Azure. A chief integration is Finastra’s FusionFabric.cloud developer platform, which gives financial institutions access to a growing line of applications. Finastra listed Deerwood, Minnesota-based Deerwood Bank as an institution that recently made the switch.