MILAN, Oct 25 Reuters Italy39;s UniCredit on Wednesday announced improvements to its mobile banking service Buddybank, in a move that Chief Executive Andrea Orcel said would ease the eventual transition to a cloudbased core banking infrastructure.

Traditional banks face the challenge of shifting their IT operations on to the cloud, moving away from a system known as mainframe whose programming language is increasingly obsolete, making it hard to recruit young staff able to work with it.

Buddybank, which UniCredit launched in 2018, currently serves 410,000 people, who were mostly newly acquired customers who did not already bank with it.

UniCredit will now offer all of its clients the possibility of switching to Buddy REvolution, the revamped mobile app through which it will make available all of its services and products, including for example lending.

It will also offer additional services such as real estate advice. Buddy users can count on assistance from support staff as well as advisory services from dedicated bankers.

UniCredit had managed to unify the backend structure supporting traditional commercial banking operations and Buddybank, Orcel told a press conference.

Up until now there were two separate banks, it39;s no longer so, he said.

In presenting UniCredit39;s third quarter results Tuesday, Orcel told analysts the bank would accelerate on Phase 2 of our digital transformation … moving decisively from onpremises IT software to cloud with a unified…