BCCL

Technology choice, lowering the cost of IT

Buenos Aires, Argentina

At a Glance

● Around 4 million daily transactions attributed to its core banking solution

● 91.5% increase in members deposits

● 40,410 new members while reducing slightly the number of employees

Banco Credicoop Cooperative Limitado (BCCL) is a large cooperative bank headquartered in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The bank provides a wide range of services to small and medium enterprises, cooperatives, social enterprises, and individuals through the bank’s 276 branches and 24 service centers.

As a credit co-operative the bank is owned by its members, who hold over 2.65M accounts with the Bank. Being “member-owned” drives a focus on maximizing efficiency and cost control, which is a primary objective of the bank and a catalyst for the decision to replace its core banking system as part of a digital transformation.

Increasing Complexity and Regulation

The goal of this strategic project was to have the necessary technology to ensure the bank could function efficiently in an increasingly complex industry while meeting the constantly changing regulatory requirements. The bank needed to achieve this while maintaining and subsequently reducing costs.

After analyzing 53 different possible solutions in a formal selection process, the bank selected Temenos core banking as it met its demanding technological requirements.

It is scalable, flexible, able to be customized, and provides a wide range of functionality. The fact that Temenos invests significantly in research and development to enhance and enrich the product while designing for upgradability was also an important factor in our decision process.”
Gabriel Skliar, Core Implementation Project Manager at Banco Credicoop Cooperative Limitado

Why is Technology Choice important?

The Temenos core banking system supports a number of industry-standard technologies off a single version of the underlying program code. To BCCL, this meant that they could make the decision on the application platform, the Business Process Management (BPM) tool, high availability architecture, operating system, and database largely independent of the Temenos core banking System. Enabling this choice provided BCCL with the ability to evaluate the technology infrastructure based on cost, support, reliability, etc., and did not lock the bank into this choice. This translates into lower costs and higher service levels for the technology platform that Temenos core banking runs on.

BCCL chose Red Hat, a certified partner of Temenos, to support the implementation of Temenos core banking on an Oracle 11g database. Red Hat deployed the Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) as an application server in cluster mode for the Temenos software, as well as the Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite and Red Hat Cluster for high availability.

The goal of this major strategic project was to have the necessary technology to ensure the bank could function efficiently in an increasingly complex industry, as well as meet changing regulatory requirements while maintaining costs.”
Pablo Recepter, CIO at Banco Credicoop Cooperative Limitado

Managing the Migration Risk

The bank, right from the outset, understood the importance of the business change impact from an employee and customer perspective and wanted to ensure that the benefits of this strategic transformation project were actually achieved. It chose to take an incremental renovation phase-by-phase approach to minimize risk and deliver benefits sooner, while the whole project may take longer to deliver.

Migrating 276 branches, 24 service centers and 2.65M customer accounts is not a trivial task. Given the incremental step-by-step approach, over 130 interfaces were created to enable this progressive co-existence with the bank’s third-party and in-house applications. The bank also created a test bed of 25,000 test cases to ensure that every aspect of the new core banking system and its co-existence with the broader application landscape were tested effectively for both functionality and performance.

Embracing the Digital Revolution?

BCCL now has the core foundations and agility to take advantage of the digital revolution happening in Argentina and throughout Latin America. In 2017, the bank increased the number of members by 40,410 while keeping its number of employees slightly lower than the prior year.

In the two years since the end of 2015, the amount of deposits has increased by 91.5%.

The bank now has a strategic partner in Temenos who helps unravel the complexity while addressing the constant regulation through enhancements and new functionality made available via annual maintenance updates.

BCCL is certainly maintaining, if not reducing, costs, increasing productivity, and, most importantly, delivering a superior customer experience.

We analyze 53 different possible solutions in a formal selection process and found that Temenos core banking met our demanding technological requirements. It is scalable, flexible, able to be customized and provides a wide range of functionality. We also appreciate how Temenos invests heavily in research and development.”
Gabriel Skliar, Core Implementation Project Manager at Banco Credicoop Cooperative Limitado