BCCL upgrades core banking platform with Red Hat and Temenos

“This standardization means better interoperability between our systems and helps us avoid the incompatibility issues we tend to see with proprietary software.” -- Pablo Recepter, CIO at BCCL

As industry and regulatory environments in Argentina have evolved, Banco Credicoop Cooperativo Limitado (BCCL) needed to upgrade its core banking platform as part of its digital transformation initiative. To take advantage of this new platform, BCCL, a large cooperative bank that handles 2.65 million customer accounts and up to 4 million transactions a day in 267 branches and 24 service centers across the country, also needed to upgrade its software to create a robust IT foundation for its core banking systems and Temenos software.

Keeping pace with change

According to Pablo Recepter, CIO at BCCL, the project’s goal was to implement the necessary technology to ensure the bank’s transactions could function reliably and efficiently in an increasingly complex industry, as well as meet changing regulatory requirements. Cost containment was another major consideration.   

After evaluating several solutions, BCCL selected open source solutions from Red Hat, a Temenos certified partner. Already, the open source Red Hat platform has met key imperatives of BCCL’s operations so it can offer the kinds of innovative banking services it wants to deliver to its customers, effectively and safely operate in a complex regulatory environment and scale to meet its higher processing requirements.

Improved reliability for customers

The project has delivered several key benefits for BCCL and its customers:

• Greater system reliability—With Red Hat software in place, BCCL has been able to avoid unscheduled downtime for its critical banking systems. Without this level of reliability, the bank would be unable to offer core retail banking services, such as customer access to account details or fund transfers. “Red Hat JBoss EAP is robust, with no outages to date, and it saves time in daily maintenance,” said BCCL’s CTO Ricardo Soto. “One of the capabilities we found most useful is the online live updating feature that eliminates any downtime for updates.”
• Open source innovation—The bank has made open source a priority and uses it whenever possible, largely because of all the documentation and community support. “The variety of options helps us to meet our requirements, including keeping costs low and complying with increasingly complex regulation, with software that uses standard formats and specifications,” Recepter noted. “This standardization means better interoperability between our systems and helps us avoid the incompatibility issues we tend to see with proprietary software.”  
• Faster processing—Faster workflows were necessary to support the bank’s daily 4 million transactions. Red Hat Process Automation Manager seamlessly handles dozens of processes and thousands of daily procedures across the bank’s departments, from human resources to foreign trade, allowing employees to devote attention to value-creating work instead of rote processes.

Scaling for digital transformation

The bank was familiar with Red Hat Enterprise Linux from previous projects, and based on these positive experiences, selected it to support its Temenos T24 solution, as well as its Oracle 11g database. The bank deployed Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) as an application server in cluster mode for its Temenos software, as well as Red Hat Process Automation Manager and Red Hat Enterprise Linux High-Availability Add-On for its network file system (NFS).

Implementation occurred in multiple phases, and even during the implementation, modifications were required to keep pace with regulatory changes. More than 25,000 test cases were undertaken during the testing process, and the final system was implemented in one location before being rolled out to all branches. As of August 2018, BCCL was running nearly 100 servers on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, 32 JBoss EAP cores, and 16 Process Automation Manager cores.

Working with Red Hat, Temenos, and other local partners on its core banking project has helped BCCL implement new capabilities to keep pace and scale with market demands while avoiding the cost and vendor lock-in of proprietary software and other vendor solutions. Learn more about how Red Hat works to create robust IT environments for the financial services industry.