For its new always-on, all-digital Hello bank! project, BNL’s goal was to improve customer acquisition by providing the most innovative, customer-focused banking services. The project called for implementing new technology as well as staying on top of technological innovations. There were a few obstacles.

“We needed to transition from traditional, manual workflows to digital business processes,” says Federico Pastore, program manager for BNL’s TIBCO
Competency Center. “We wanted to reduce costs, and move from centralized back-office management to distributed management. That meant we needed a strong infrastructure for application integration. We had built a lot of heterogeneous applications over the years, and as a consequence, we didn’t have the standardization that would let us build the services we needed in the time we had available.

To quickly acquire the technologies and best practice methodologies it needed, BNL worked with NTTData to establish an in-house TIBCO competency center. Andrea de Stefano is head of the business process management and integration competency center for NTTData in Rome, Italy. “Our experience with SOA, and with TIBCO’s business process management solution, led to the implementation project with BNL. Using standard methodologies and our experience in the banking industry, we also helped BNL with project management and agile methodologies.”

“The competency center helped us quickly acquire knowledge on the technologies and methodologies and share it with the rest of the group through guidelines and best practice patterns,” says Pastore.

BNL and NTTData designed a new back-end infrastructure that would manage any kind of transaction coming from any channel—SMS, mobile phone purchases, self-service kiosk, contact center, ATM, or computer. The new infrastructure, including TIBCO BPM, integration, event processing, analytics, and master data management software, will orchestrate and execute response across all channels, improving overall performances and enabling a real multichannel customer experience.

Automation, Lower TCO, and Faster Time to Market
BNL has found that its new TIBCO infrastructure carries a lower total cost of ownership than its previous systems. “Taking the cost of the infrastructure, development activities, maintenance, and other costs, we reduced TCO by 25%,” says Mr. Pastore. “We changed our approach and moved from complex manual workflows to fully integrated, fully automated workflows,” he says. “We improved our time to market simply through business process automation. We can now monitor processes end-to-end, as well as the lead time of activities and the workload of internal personnel over those processes.”

Multi-channel Customer Engagement
One of the key achievements, of course, was a multi-channel customer experience. “Now, a customer can start a banking request on one channel, like the web, and finalize it on another channel, like their phone, with full security and without losing any data,” says Pastore.

Business Enablement
BNL wants to extend Hello bank! globally, and now it has the resources to do it. “The requirement for globalization was to build a strong infrastructure that
could enable the most innovative banking services in the most flexible way,” says Pastore. “We trust in TIBCO platforms for our customers and our business.”

Pastore says that BNL’s competency center has prepared the company to innovate. “With the competency center, we can adapt to the changing needs of
banking,” he says. “Our plans are to improve the competency center and extend this technology within both BNL and the rest of the BNP Paribas banking group.”