Network Infrastructure Consolidation: Banque Internationale Arabe de Tunisie (BIAT) Accelerates FinTech Innovation
In recent years, the innovative development of the FinTech industry in Africa has entered a fast lane. An increasing number of traditional financial institutions are accelerating the deep integration of digital technology and financial scenarios, injecting new impetus into the innovative development of their businesses. Among them, North African countries represented by Tunisia are gradually becoming the pioneers in the African Fintech industry.
As the largest private bank in Tunisia, Banque Internationale Arabe de Tunisie (BIAT) holds a 35% market share in the retail banking sector and has 206 branches across the country, establishing a vast financial services network. In line with the trend of Fintech development in Tunisia, BIAT is also actively promoting its digital and intelligent transformation.
Now, BIAT, taking the construction of its new building as a new starting point, is fully accelerating the pace of digital and intelligent transformation and promote innovative business development. At the same time, this also puts forward new requirements for the construction of network infrastructure – an efficient, secure, and intelligent campus network is needed. To this end, BIAT has built such a campus network through cooperation with Huawei, providing strong support for the sustained and rapid development of its business.
For BIAT, if the construction of the new building is an important milestone in the company's development, then network infrastructure plays a key role in this process. The network is not only an important "tool" for realizing intelligent office operations but also the "central nervous system" that undertakes the bank's core services such as daily office work, financial data interaction, and customer service support, drives FinTech innovation, and ensures business security.
First, in terms of daily office operations, a high-speed and stable network for hundreds of employees is urgently needed by BIAT, which is capable to meet the employees’ needs for high-speed access and multi-terminal collaboration and ensure seamless access to the wireless network in every corner such as offices, meeting rooms, and rest areas, so as to guarantee smooth internal communication and remote interaction with branches, and improve employees' work efficiency and office experience.
Second, in terms of business support, banking businesses often need to provide 7X24-hour uninterrupted services to customers, which means any network outage may lead to transaction failures, customer complaints, and huge financial losses. Therefore, BIAT urgently needs to build a more highly available, reliable, and secure network infrastructure and adopt enterprise-level highly reliable devices to ensure the continuity of key businesses and 7X24-hour stable service operation while enhancing network security capabilities.
Third, in terms of network operation and maintenance (O&M), since the network needs to support a large number of Internet of Things devices and various business systems, the way to conduct network management through a unified platform is directly related to network operation efficiency and business continuity. Therefore, in the construction of the new network, BIAT also needs to accelerate its adoption of intelligent network O&M to simplify deployment and O&M processes.
In addition, BIAT is actively promoting the in-depth integration of digital technologies such as AI and big data with financial businesses. Therefore, the network infrastructure must not only meet the current needs of the enterprise's digital and intelligent transformation but also have a certain degree of forward-looking and flexible scalability to adapt to future expansion and cope with future technological changes and business growth.
To meet the new requirements for the network put forward by BIAT in its business innovation, Huawei, relying on its rich experience in serving customers in many industries, has customized a new network infrastructure for BIAT through diversified network products and technology combinations such as optical fiber transmission, strongly supporting BIAT's digital and intelligent transformation and sustained business innovation.
Among the solutions, Huawei's NetEngine AR651 router, based on a non-blocking switching architecture, not only provides performance three times higher than the industry average but also integrates multiple functions such as SD-WAN, routing, switching, VPN, security, and WLAN, which can meet BIAT's demand for high-performance network equipment under the trends of business diversification and cloudification.
The matching Huawei CloudEngine S6730-H24X6C switches are a new generation of enterprise-level core and aggregation layer switches, which also have high performance, high reliability, cloud management, and intelligent O&M capabilities. This product has a variety of port types to meet diverse network bandwidth needs, supports cloud management, enables full-lifecycle cloud-managed network services including planning, deployment, and fault repair, and effectively simplifies the customer's network architecture and the number of devices reducing network construction costs.
At the same time, Huawei's CloudEngine S5731-H48P4XC switches, as a new generation of intelligent Gigabit switches, have the capabilities of in-depth wired-wireless integration, service follow-up, and VXLAN, which enables them to meet BIAT's demand for multi-purpose use of the campus network and provide a consistent user experience. In addition, this product also supports abnormal traffic detection, threat analysis of encrypted traffic, and network-wide threat trapping, further ensuring network security.
Huawei's AirEngine 5760-51, as a new generation of indoor Access Points (APs), can flexibly switch between dual-band and tri-band modes through software-defined radio frequency, which can meet BIAT's different demands for high network performance and high-density scenarios. At the same time, this product also supports independent radio frequency scanning, making it suitable for deployment in high-interference scenarios, and its built-in intelligent antenna can effectively improve signal gain, allowing the signal to follow the user to truly achieve full coverage without dead ends.
In addition, Huawei's AC6508 Access Controllers can help BIAT manage a large number of APs and integrate the function of Gigabit Ethernet switches at the same time, realizing a wired-wireless integrated access method. The function of flexibly configuring the management number of wireless access points endows them with good scalability, enabling them to support centralized management of all APs.
Now, with the help of Huawei's comprehensive network products and solutions, BIAT has built a new network foundation. Through the deployment of WAN links (including 1Ge Copper and 10 Ge Fiber) and M-LAG Links, this foundation not only brings about a comprehensive improvement in network security, stability, and network experience but also realizes simple and efficient network O&M, laying a solid foundation for the innovative development of its business.
In terms of network experience, BIAT can achieve full coverage of the wireless network with high concurrency and low latency by deploying a full set of Wi-Fi 6 wireless access devices, and completely eliminate data transmission bottlenecks between devices achieving an ultimate Internet access experience and allowing users to enjoy a continuously stable high-speed data transmission experience and network access experience by deploying 10GE switches for data exchange .
In terms of network reliability, the Huawei network products deployed by BIAT are all enterprise-level devices, which have strong stability and security and effectively ensure 7X24-hour uninterrupted network service operation. For example, in terms of stability, the devices adopt industrial-grade components and redundant design to ensure that a single point of failure does not affect the overall network service and in terms of security, the products can effectively resist external attacks and manage internal permissions to ensure the security of the business network and data.
In terms of network O&M, BIAT uses the AC (Wireless Access Controller) as a unified management platform and conducts centralized visual monitoring, configuration, and policy delivery for all APs (Access Points), while the AP devices have plug-and-play capabilities, which can greatly shorten the installation and configuration time and significantly simplify network deployment and subsequent maintenance. This not only significantly reduces network deployment costs but also greatly improves the efficiency of network O&M.
Under the sweeping digital wave, the quality improvement, efficiency enhancement, and inclusive expansion of financial services are increasingly dependent on solid network support. The upgrade of BIAT's network infrastructure is not only a technological innovation but also a strategic fulcrum for it to lead FinTech innovation and drive business transformation. By joining hands with Huawei to build an efficient, secure, and intelligent campus network, BIAT has achieved a comprehensive improvement in network performance, reliability, and O&M efficiency, paving the way for the deepening of FinTech applications such as high-frequency trading, real-time risk control, and intelligent customer service. This move not only further strengthens its own competitiveness in the retail banking sector but also sets a benchmark for the digital and intelligent transformation of the African financial industry.
