How BNP Paribas made its IT infrastructure stable, secure, and resilient while increasing clients’ return on investment

One of the world’s largest banking groups sought to insource its IT infrastructure. In doing so, the institution wanted to enable its clients to get the most return on investment on their pension funds.

BNP Paribas is an international banking group with divisions in retail banking, investment and protection services, and corporate and institutional banking. These services include asset management for corporate and institutional clients. Established in 1848 as a French national bank, the institution today operates in 68 countries and has over 193,000 employees.

Given the need for fast time to market and desire to achieve value creation as quickly as possible, BNP Paribas needed a partner that could increase stability and flexibility of its IT platform while also providing the banking group strategic consultancy. That consultancy would include fit-for-purpose software, solutions for security and compliance, and a willingness to work through different time zones for the company’s operations in the United States.

A stable, flexible IT platform is crucial for an institution that manages billions of euros in assets and wants to sustain client trust and loyalty. Having an IT partner that could lead BNP Paribas through this transformation would save money and time. If the company had insourced the project, lengthy change freezes would impact business tremendously. For example, the company would be unable to expand its portfolio of assets since it would be unable to add new pension funds.

We began by assessing the company’s application landscape. Together with BNP Paribas, we evaluated which applications needed to be migrated and/or optimized in the new architecture. We then increased the platform’s flexibility, making it easier to add new pension funds and other partners. Crucially, we limited risk by increasing the security of the platform, while ensuring 100% uptime, staying fully compliant, and meeting all legal regulations.

The optimized platform led to a decrease in IT costs and a faster method of adding new pension funds. This, in turn, increased return on investment of the pension funds. Whereas onboarding of new clients used to take up to a year, our solution cut that time down to a matter of weeks. We also reduced the threat of change freezes to 14 days, compared to over a year, thus keeping business expansion ongoing. The solution equipped asset managers with stability and control to carry out continuous risk assessments, reporting, and other daily operations. The stable platform also facilitated data delivery and reporting, which helped asset managers manage new portfolios. BNP Paribas asked us to implement the same solution for its operations in the United States, which we did successfully. This proved the platform could be virtually implemented in another country – in fact, in any time zone and even done remotely because of COVID-19 travel restrictions – without ever missing a net asset value (NAV) reporting deadline.