Success Stories


Technology choice, lowering the cost of IT

Buenos Aires, Argentina

Banco Credicoop Cooperative Limitado (BCCL) is a large cooperative bank headquartered in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The bank provides a wide range of services to small and medium enterprises, cooperatives, social enterprises and individuals through the bank’s 265 branches and 24 service centres.

As a credit co-operative the bank is owned by its members who hold over 2,65M accounts with the Bank. Being “member-owned” drives a focus on maximising efficiency and cost control which is a primary objective of the bank, and a catalyst for the decision to replace its core banking system as part of a Digital Transformation.

Increasing Complexity and Regulation

The goal of this strategic project was to have the necessary technology to ensure the bank could function efficiently in an increasingly complex industry, while meeting the constantly changing regulatory requirements The bank needed to achieve this while maintaining and subsequently reducing costs.

Around four million daily transactions attributed to its core banking solution

After analysing 53 different possible solutions in a formal selection process the bank selected Temenos Transact as it met its demanding technological requirements.

Gabriel Skliar, BCCL Core Implementation Project Manager, states “It is scalable, flexible, able to be customised, and provides a wide range of functionality. The fact that Temenos invests significantly in research and development to enhance and enrich the product while designing for upgradability was also an important factor in our decision process.”

Why is Technology Choice important?

The Temenos Transact system supports a number of industry standard technologies off a single version of the underlying program code. To BCCL this meant that they could make the decision on the Application Platform, the Business Process Management (BPM) tool, high availability architecture, operating system and database largely independent of the Temenos Transact System. Enabling this choice provided BCCL with the ability to evaluate the technology infrastructure based on cost, support, reliability etc. and does not lock the bank into this choice. This translates into lower costs with higher service levels for the technology platform that Temenos Transact runs on.

BCCL chose Red Hat, a certified partner of Temenos, to support the implementation of Temenos Transact on an Oracle 11g database. Red Hat deployed Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) as an application server in cluster mode for the Temenos software, as well as Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite and Red Hat Cluster for high availability.

”The goal of this major strategic project was to have the necessary technology to ensure the bank could function efficiently in an increasingly complex industry, as well as meet changing regulatory requirements while maintaining costs.”

Pablo Recepter, CIO

Managing the Migration Risk

The bank, right from the outset, understood the importance of the business change impact from an employee and customer perspective and wanted to ensure that the benefits of this strategic transformation project were actually achieved. It chose to take an incremental renovation phase-by-phase approach to minimise risk, deliver benefits sooner while the whole project may take longer to deliver.

91.5% increase in members deposits (2016-2017)

Migrating 265 branches, 24 service centres and 2.65M customer accounts is not a trivial task. Given the incremental step-by-step approach, over 130 interfaces were created to enable this progressive co-existence with the banks 3rd party and in-house applications. The bank also created a test bed of 25,000 test cases to ensure that every aspect of the new core banking system and its co-existence with the broader application landscape were tested effectively for both functionality and performance.

Embracing the Digital Revolution?

BCCL now has the core foundations and agility to take advantage of the digital revolution happening in Argentina and throughout Latin America. In 2017, the bank increased the number of members by 40,410 while keeping its number of employees at slightly less than the prior year.

In the two years since the end of 2015, the amount of deposits increased by 91.5%.

40,410 new members (2016 to 2017), while reducing slightly the number of employees

The bank now has a strategic partner in Temenos who helps unravel the complexity while addressing the constant regulation through enhancements and new functionality made available via annual maintenance updates.

BCCL is certainly maintaining if not reducing costs, increasing productivity, and most importantly, delivering a superior customer experience.

”We analyze 53 different possible solutions in a formal selection process and found that Temenos Transact met our demanding technological requirements. It is scalable, flexible, able to be customized and provides a wide range of functionality. We also appreciate how Temenos invests heavily in research and development.”

Gabriel Skliar, Core Implementation Project Manager

Banco Credicoop Argentina Success Story

Banco Credicoop modernizes core banking platform with Temenos and Red Hat