BBVA has its head in the cloud.

Through a partnership with Red Hat, announced today, the global bank has designed and deployed an automated cloud based on Red Hat’s OpenStack Platform. The new cloud will allow the bank to have a “highly scalable” infrastructure to support faster digital services and applications to customers, such as BBVA’s Digital Wallet app, Red Hat’s spokeswoman told Bank Innovation.

Red Hat is best known for its flavor of the open-source operating system Linux, built for enterprise use. Its cloud platform, though the code is open source, is still “private” — under the control of the FI, rather than “public,” where Amazon or IBM may hold some jurisdiction.

Additionally, BBVA will utilize Red Hat solutions to host and manage container-based applications in the cloud. Doing so, the bank said, will enable BBVA to “manage the growth of financial transactions on digital devices and deliver digital banking services to its global customers,” according to a bank press release.

“We are facing a new scenario that requires keeping the customer at the center of everything we do, and technology is one of the key levers to tackle this transformation process,” BBVA Head of Engineering Ricardo Moreno said. “This collaboration agreement with Red Hat will help us to capitalize on the opportunities offered by cloud computing technologies, in order to continue making strides in our process of becoming a more flexible and scalable digital bank.”

Open-source cloud has gained popularity across many industries, but the financial services industry is “ahead of the curve,” a Red Hat spokeswoman told Bank Innovation.

Online banking, mobile banking, new banking services, and other trends are forcing all financial services organizations to put the customer first and deliver new applications and services faster without compromising security. Also, financial services organizations were some of the early adopters for open source, and specifically Linux, because it offered them more flexibility, more security, and better value. In the cloud era, for financial services organizations, where security and governance are critical, private clouds are a compelling option — they get the cloud environment and capabilities with the added control their business may require.

In short, “cloud” is no longer a scary word in banking. As firms like NICE Actimize introduce more security tools for cloud-based financial services, FIs are becoming less reluctant to move important information from in-house environments to the cloud.