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“Cloudability became our clear choice, The flexibility of the tool is exceptional. It caters effortlessly to different user personas without requiring technical expertise.”
Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI), a leading corporate and investment bank operating across Central and Eastern Europe, launched a strategic initiative to optimize its cloud investments and improve visibility across its multi-cloud landscape. Facing growing complexity and pressure for financial accountability, RBI selected Cloudability following a rigorous evaluation process. Within just a few months, the bank achieved enhanced cost transparency, streamlined its internal chargeback procedures, and empowered teams across 11 markets with real-time, actionable insights.
Raiffeisen Bank International is one of Austria’s leading corporate and investment banks headquartered in Vienna, Austria. The company operates as a universal bank across Central and Eastern European (CEE) markets and offers a broad portfolio including corporate banking, retail banking, investment banking, asset management, leasing, and M&A advisory services. RBI was officially founded in 2010, but its roots date back to the 19th century. With over 42,000 employees serving 18 million customers across 11 countries, RBI is the leading corporate investment bank for Austria’s top 1,000 companies throughout Central and Eastern Europe.
RBI began its cloud journey in 2017, adopting a cloud-first strategy to improve agility, flexibility, and modernization. As public cloud usage scaled to over 1,200 environments across 3 different public cloud providers, cost management became increasingly complex. The organization relied on native cloud tools and Power BI dashboards to help optimize costs. These tools, while useful, lacked the granularity, flexibility, and business-oriented visibility required for cross-functional teams to take true ownership of their cloud spending.
“We relied on cloud-native tools, which worked well until we needed to provide broader functionality and accountability to individual product teams,” said Peter Vagner, Head of Cloud at RBI.
RBI also faced challenges managing a complex internal chargeback process, there was limited transparency for stakeholders and cost centers across their federated organizational structure.
To address these challenges, RBI conducted a formal proof-of-concept and vendor selection process to find a better cost management solution. Ultimately, IBM Cloudability was chosen for its maturity, SaaS delivery model, and configurability. Vagner also highlighted the solution’s ability to support multiple stakeholder personas—FinOps professionals, developers, cost controllers, and business leaders—through intuitive dashboards and data access as a key benefit.
“Cloudability became our clear choice,” he said. “The flexibility of the tool is exceptional. It caters effortlessly to different user personas without requiring technical expertise.”
The bank also deployed Apptio’s TBM Studio to model and automate its complex chargeback mechanism, making it easier to track shared costs and allocate savings across business units and cloud consumers.
Vagner said adopting IBM Cloudability helped deliver significant outcomes for the company.
Cloudability provided real-time, intuitive dashboards and multi-cloud reporting across all of RBI’s cloud environments, replacing fragmented views the company had previously built from vendor-native tools. Cloudability’s out-of-the-box views combined with customization in Apptio BI allowed users to explore, filter, and analyze costs by service, account, team, and key performance indicators.
According to Vagner, transparency improved accountability and laid the foundation for decentralized decision-making. “We increased transparency,” he said. “This is the main benefit. Now, our teams can directly monitor their costs, create tailored dashboards, and implement specific KPIs.”
Prior to Cloudability, RBI relied on a central team to provide insight on cloud usage and spend. Cloudability’s role-based access and user-friendly design made it easy for non-technical users to log in and explore their own cost data. Additionally, teams operating shared internal platforms used the tool to track consumption by customer and re-invoice based on usage.
“Any manager, product owner, or cost controller can log in and check what is in their interest,” said Ionut Ciontu, FinOps lead at RBI. “And platform teams can also do their own internal cross-charging based on consumption data, not just artificial Excel formulas.”
This shift from central oversight to distributed ownership increased accountability and was critical to RBI’s “cloud-first” strategy. It allowed each product team, across countries and units, to take control of their cloud usage and financial impact, without waiting for reports to come from the central team.
Before adopting Cloudability, RBI relied on custom scripts and manual transformations to implement chargebacks, which lacked transparency and scalability. Using Cloudability and Apptio’s TBM Studio, RBI modeled a multi-tier chargeback system that consolidated centrally billed cloud services and distributed them proportionally to product teams and network units. The chargeback logic incorporated also reallocation of savings plans costs and benefits, credits, shared services, and was exposed as custom datasets for end-user access.
According to Ciontu, implementing chargeback in TBM Studio made all the costs and all the benefits more visible to their customers. This enabled RBI to clearly justify financial distributions, streamline billing, and build trust across internal stakeholders.
Cost pressure is constant in banking, and RBI needed tools that translated technical optimization into financial results. Cloudability’s right-sizing insights, idle resource detection, and savings plan simulation capabilities gave RBI the ability to act on optimization opportunities, and the company used the tool to support strategic purchases of savings plans and monitor compute usage across regions and teams. This enabled teams to quantify waste, identify cost anomalies, set KPIs, and align stakeholders on action plans.
With cost data now integrated into decision workflows, teams were able to act quickly on financial insights. RBI began implementing dashboards focused on efficiency KPIs (e.g., GP2 vs. GP3 usage) and designed these as inputs to a gamified model that incentivized teams to improve. This gave teams the data they needed to create mechanisms to track and reward cost-efficiency behavior.
“We can be faster on decisions and faster on execution because motivation and justification are clearer and stronger,” Vagner said.
According to Vagner, RBI has more plans in store for improving cloud cost accountability. The company wants to expand its KPI framework and introduce more gamification elements to reinforce a culture of cost accountability across product teams. And their roadmap also includes enhanced unit cost tracking and resource-level efficiency metrics, leveraging Cloudability’s evolving capabilities.
