The Portugese bank is leveraging Azure, Radius, WebFOCUS and several other technologies:
Millennium bcp is Portugal’s largest private bank with some 6 million customers and more than 1350 branches. Originally called Banco Comercial Portugues, or Portuguese Commercial Bank, it got its present name in 2004. It is designated as a Significant Institution under the European Banking Supervision and is directly supervised by the European Central Bank.
The bank offers retail banking products and a range of investment banking services, including delta one equity and commodity trading products, besides personalized insurance products.
Besides Portugal, Millennium bcp has presence in several countries, including Spain, France, Switzerland, Mozambique, Angola and Brazil. The bank has been investing in technology and digitization for more than a decade, which it claims has brought in a true digital business transformation.
HIGHER CUSTOMER VALUE
It has adopted innovative practices and its focus is on delivering exceptional customer value. The bank has a legacy that is connected with technology induction and it is one of the first in Europe to introduce ATMs and alternative payment methods. Again, it is among the first to have online services and use its website to offer an online financial marketplace.
It is a pioneer in the adoption of cloud. In fact, its digital transformation strategy is based on a cloud-first approach, and it has been working to build a platform that can be used by all development teams to accelerate application development and deployment while ensuring security, compliance and operational excellence.
CLOUD ADOPTION
It has implemented Microsoft Azure for agile deployment capabilities with container and multi-cloud technology. Very early, the bank invested in Azure DevOps to facilitate agile development processes. To overcome some of the drawbacks, it identified and inducted container technology which helped it to speed up development and at the same time meet its data localization, data residency and security requirements. It chose GitOPs for the Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Arc-managed Flux as its core deployment baseline.
The bank has used digital to create some unique and innovative products. For example, it had some time ago introduced an insurance product, the main feature of which is that a customer can program his or her insurance – he or she can ‘switch it on’ or ‘switch it off’ so that it is activated only on the days when he or she needs the cover.
ROBOTIZATION
It has also introduced what it describes ‘robotization’ whereby it has eliminated manual tasks and freeing up the staff to do tasks that are of higher value. It is making use of generative AI to eliminate use of paper and implementing character recognition, NLP and deep learning tools to optimize efficiency and to offer the most advanced banking products to its customers.
The bank has implemented Radius, the open-source, cloud-native, application platform. Radius helps developers and operators to define, deploy and collaborate on cloud-native applications across public clouds and private infrastructure. Using the platform, the bank seeks to standardize processes, expedite developer workflows and future-proof its infrastructure. The goal was to improve from ‘days of work’ to ‘just minutes’ when deploying an application across all environments. This includes the ability to deploy across multiple clouds and meeting the cloud-agnostic requirements of the bank. The bank is now able to provide a self-service experience to developers, allowing them to focus on their applications and not on the underlying infrastructure.
The bank says Radius has become its main infrastructure orchestration and choreography tool, with the ability to target multiple cloud and on-premises providers through multiple infrastructure implementation patterns for the same infrastructure resource types.
FOR BETTER KPI
The bank intended to minimize decentralized reporting activities within individual lines of business and establish standard calculation methodologies for KPIs. This, it realized would ensure consistency in reports throughout the enterprise while providing for clean, accurate, and usable information across the various lines of business. It then evaluated Information Builders’ WebFOCUS and decided to have it implemented. The first phase of the project was to deliver a customized dashboard with specific KPIs tailored to each of the 4 management levels within the bank. The system enabled the bank’s managers to focus on the most relevant metrics that influence performance. They can quickly comprehend the data and foster a proactive, data-driven culture. The system also improved commercial activity and boosted revenue.
Millennium bcp now aims to have the most advanced digital, mobile and analytics capabilities and integration in value chains and ecosystems (embedding into its customers’ needs and reach). It will be a mobile-centric digitization, aiming to speed up the transformation of customer experience and maximizing productivity gains across geographies. The focus is on having a mobile-centric approach and setting up a convenient and productive omnichannel model.
The bank has devised a major strategy plan, which it hopes, will help it to accomplish several targets it has set for 2024 – improving its cost-income ratio to ~40% and profitability at an ROE of ~10%. It is also focusing on risk management, aiming to significantly lower the cost of risk (to ~50 bps) and the NPE ratio (to ~4%), while keeping a prudent CET 1 ratio (>12.5%).
This article has been compiled based on publicly available information on the web, particularly the bank’s own website.
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