As a number one monetary group in Spain, CaixaBank has lengthy been an innovator by taking a technology-first method by putting innovation, digital transformation, buyer expertise and sustainable banking on the forefront of its technique. The financial institution reportedly serves 20 million clients and is a rustic chief in digital banking with greater than 11 million clients.
For years, the financial institution has been a part of IBM’s rising ecosystem of economic establishments and know-how companions leveraging IBM Cloud for Monetary Companies to assist ship extra improved buyer providers and merchandise higher tailor-made to every particular person buyer’s monetary wants. CaixaBank is continuous its initiative to extend cloud absorption. With reporting greater than 200 billion transactions on the finish of 2022, CaixaBank understands how important it’s to scale securely, improve operational effectivity and speed up time to market to optimize digital banking experiences—all whereas safeguarding clients’ information.
This week IBM opened the doorways to our newest Multi Zone Area (MZR) in Madrid, Spain, designed to assist European firms speed up their modernization journey. The MZR may help ship resiliency, efficiency and safety to assist purchasers leverage hybrid cloud and AI options in a secured atmosphere. Moreover, IBM Cloud’s operations within the MZR in Madrid, Spain makes use of a community of knowledge facilities backed by 100% renewable electrical energy.
We spoke with Pere Nebot, Chief Info Officer of CaixaBank, on how IBM Cloud has served as a catalyst for digital transformation because the financial institution strives to combine simplicity into its innovation to construct services that financially empower its purchasers.
The digital transformation journey might be difficult to combine new platforms and purposes shortly and seamlessly, particularly with rising safety complexities and evolving regulatory and compliance requirements. How can monetary establishments overcome these challenges to construct trusted and established digital manufacturers that ship the experiences that clients want?
CaixaBank focuses on enhancing the flexibleness, scalability, and effectivity of its IT infrastructure, an method which permits us to enhance value effectivity, probably diversify outsourcing, scale back time-to-market, improve timing of variations, and change into extra resilient.
For instance, the financial institution efficiently and reliably accomplished the biggest technological integration within the historical past of the Spanish banking system with its merger with Bankia in 2021 – all with none service interruption. This was a milestone that concerned the migration of 10.4 petabytes of data in lower than 24 hours, and the digitalization of greater than 2,500 million paperwork, in addition to setting a capability to handle as much as 29,000 transactions per second.
On the subject of infrastructure, we all know any system downtime has real-world penalties and prices. Throughout an integration course of, information might be in transit in a number of locations, finally making it weak to fraud and different subtle cybersecurity schemes. Cybersecurity pressures will all the time be current, and due to this fact, monetary establishments want the proper ecosystem of companions to seamlessly assist navigate these challenges and construct trusted platforms and providers which can be past the boundaries of a standard financial institution. These companions should even be compliant because the monetary providers business is inundated with stringent regulatory legal guidelines. Leveraging IBM Cloud for Monetary Companies supplies the built-in safety and compliance controls for us to host purposes and migrate mission important workloads within the cloud with confidence and enhance operational efficiencies to offer seamless and frictionless buyer experiences.
We view the following chapter of digital transformation as harnessing the mixed energy of hybrid cloud and AI to assist drive development and efficiency in an business panorama rife with new and nimble digital opponents. How is CaixaBank leveraging each applied sciences to efficiently combine and execute simplicity into innovation?
CaixaBank and IBM have been working collectively for over a decade to assist drive new options for the banking business with a aim of accelerating velocity for processing numerous transactions in an open, secured, and scalable atmosphere. To perform this, we have to proceed to keep up the very best ranges of operational effectivity to efficiently ship an ecosystem of merchandise, providers and hyper-personalized experiences tailor-made to every buyer’s monetary wants. You will need to keep in mind that simplicity means making selections simpler for our clients, which results in producing extra engagement with them.
Our collaboration with IBM has helped us mix our present technological infrastructures with an up to date atmosphere that helps evolve core enterprise purposes with cloud and synthetic intelligence. We developed one of many first digital banking assistants created in Europe. Constructed with IBM Watson, the AI-based digital assistant manages hundreds of thousands of shopper conversations every month, dealing with duties resembling serving to financial institution staff shortly receive related detailed details about new shopper choices and helping cell clients by way of chat with day-to-day queries.
The IBM Cloud Multizone Area (MZR) is a key milestone to maintain providing our clients the most effective person expertise we are able to, whereas sustaining the very best ranges of data confidentiality and safety.
CaixaBank’s IT firm, known as CaixaBank Tech, additionally serves as a key enabler for digital transformation. CaixaBank Tech incorporates most of CaixaBank Group’s specialised know-how and methods groups to assist facilitate the attraction and retention of inner and exterior expertise.
Monetary establishments and its stakeholders have targeted extra consideration on local weather change, thrusting sustainability necessities much more firmly into the highlight. Sustainability methods have to be impactful and sensible. How is CaixaBank mobilizing sustainability efforts to assist its purchasers transition to a sustainable and low-carbon economic system?
CaixaBank has roots in delivering social influence for the good thing about society by way of its mission in serving to clients enhance their monetary well-being. The financial institution has developed a Sustainable Banking Plan, which incorporates proposals to unravel sustainability challenges resembling inequality, local weather change and unemployment.
CaixaBank goals to mobilize €64 billion in sustainable finance by 2024, together with financing and development in mutual funds, pension plans and sustainable intermediation. Within the first 12 months of the plan’s life, the mobilization price has elevated by 27%, from €18.53bn in 2021 to €23.58bn in 2022.
The financial institution has additionally set the aim of lowering the electrical energy holdings in its portfolio by 30%, and absolutely the emissions financed by the oil and fuel sector by 23% by 2030. At present, these two sectors as an entire account for 70% of world emissions.
CaixaBank views cloud as a beneficial asset in accelerating sustainability transformation. Unification of the financial institution’s devoted personal clouds can be serving to the financial institution not solely scale back working prices and work in a extra agile method, but additionally enhance its power effectivity.
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