LANDBANK Enhances Digital Customer Experience and Protects Against Cyberthreats with F5

LANDBANK —one of the largest and most trusted banks in the Philippines—embarked on a digital transformation journey to establish a consistent user experience, provide steady application performance and mitigate cybersecurity threats. By partnering with F5, LANDBANK enhanced the security of customer data while strengthening its digital banking services. 

As the largest government-owned bank in the Philippines, LANDBANK aims to use the best technology available to deliver responsive financial and support services to its clients while promoting sustainable development and environmental protection.

Cyberattacks are a growing problem in the Philippines. Despite regulations such as the Cybercrime Prevention Act that help criminalize online offenses, these policies do not cover mobile devices, which makes LANDBANK’s mobile applications a target for attacks.

LANDBANK was faced with a difficult task. It wanted to protect against unforeseeable cyberattacks while remaining easily accessible to its loyal customers. It also needed a partner that could support its digital transformation journey and help strengthen its reputation. Due to the turbulent landscape of evolving cyberthreats and hacking incidents, this partnership would be essential to help LANDBANK maintain its reputation as a reliable and trusted bank among its customers.

LANDBANK reached out to F5 and other security vendors to find a partner to help protect its public-facing digital applications, financial transactions, and data against breaches — while also maintaining an excellent level of service. F5 emerged as the partner of choice due to its track record of developing secure network solutions in the region, as well as the ease of deploying and using its solutions.

With F5, LANDBANK can continue to deliver its banking services as it progresses on its digital transformation journey, all without sacrificing service quality or application availability. And with more than 380 branches and counting, LANDBANK is well-positioned for future growth. 

Business Challenges

Cyberattacks can be devastating to banking and financial institutions, putting sensitive customer information and important financial data at risk. It is also difficult for banks to regain customer trust and repair a damaged reputation if they fall victim to an attack.

As LANDBANK embarked on a digital transformation journey to capture the burgeoning digital population, it needed a partner that could help protect its customer-facing applications and prevent data theft.

The Bank planned to digitize its services because online banking offers customers unmatched accessibility and convenience. However, migrating transactions to an online platform had the potential to expose the bank to more risks. The team quickly discovered that it was unable to predict the frequency and scale of attacks, which translated into a major threat to data security.

LANDBANK sought a technology solutions partner that could provide a highly-secure solution with minimal disruption to the customer experience. The Bank wanted a partner with a strong track record and proven success in providing network security solutions—particularly to the banking and financial services industry.    

Benefits

Visibility, security, and link optimization ensure consistent user experience from end-to-end.      

Real-time visibility of dataflows to and from application.    

LANDBANK used the reporting and management of network performance capabilities of BIG-IP LTM to better understand its application traffic and performance.

BIG-IP LTM also offers LANDBANK full visibility into customer data as it enters and leaves the application. This means that the security team can inspect, manage, and report fraudulent transactions as soon they are spotted. This significantly reduces the chance of fraud and glitches and minimizes disruption and downtime for end users. These benefits also resulted in time and manpower cost savings for LANDBANK. 

Easily deploy fraud detection and prevention.    

Earning and maintaining customer trust is a top priority for LANDBANK. F5’s WebSafe solution helped shield its online customers from a broad range of web fraud across multiple devices.

The bank can now prevent even the slightest of fraudulent transactions with WebSafe’s multi-layered transaction checks and risk scoring. The solution guards bank customers against credential theft, web-based malware, and online fraud that targets web application users. Its unique and advanced capabilities complement existing fraud prevention techniques, allowing LANDBANK to extend greater online fraud protection to its users.

The F5 solution also comes with 24x7 monitoring for attackers, which saves LANDBANK time and resources.

Optimizes link management to provide consistent user experience.    

LANDBANK wanted to provide a consistent and dependable user experience to its customers. F5 BIG-IP Link Controller improves application performance by monitoring the performance and availability of each link and then optimizing and prioritizing traffic.

The result is that LANDBANK’s application is optimized to work efficiently and minimizes downtime, creating a seamless customer experience.

BIG-IP Link Controller also gives LANDBANK visibility into link traffic so that it can prioritize the most cost-effective connections, keeping ISP costs to a minimum. This flexibility allows LANDBANK to streamline costs.