French Financial Group BPCE Chooses Huawei for Digital Transformation

Groupe BPCE, the second largest banking group in France and No. 104 on the 2017 Fortune Global 500 list, has put down deep roots in its local markets. Its 108,000 employees and 8,000 branches serve a total of 31.2 million customers. The Group’s different subsidiaries pursue their activities in banking and insurance, tailoring their services as closely as possible to the needs of the individuals and regions they are serving. BPCE has a total of 15 Banque Populaire banks, 16 Caisses d’Epargne, Natixis, Crédit Foncier, Banque Palatine, etc.

Groupe BPCE offers its customers a comprehensive range of products and services: Savings and investment solutions, cash management services, financing solutions, insurance, and wholesale banking services. Faithful to its status as a cooperative banking institution, the Group accompanies its customers in the realization of their different projects and develops long-lasting relationships with them, thereby contributing 20% to the drive to finance the French economy.

More and more range of products and services bring new requirements for network infrastructure; therefore, BPCE has to accelerate their digital transformation. This time, BPCE has decided to renew their branch network. So what new challenges will BPCE encounter?

Challenges

Digital transformation is key for the banks that are dedicated to ensuring the consumer-facing new services based on new architecture, like cloud-based service platform, or new service offerings in agencies like Virtual Teller Machine (VTM). High performance Wi-Fi networks continue to be deployed, and the networks must be highly scalable and have high performance that will meet the needs of the next 10 years.

More and more critical business is moved to online. Even a single business failure will result in significant financial loss and reputation damage. A redundancy protection protocol and fast convergence function are mandatory for networks.

Different from normal office business, financial business has higher requirements for security. BPCE considers security to be another key point when designing their networks. The security requirements include not only device security, but also network security and user security.

A comprehensive range of products and services help BPCE earn more business, more customers, and more revenue. Besides these benefits, they also bring new challenges for networks, including more security policies and more frequent configuration changes. These new challenges require the networks to support easy deployment and management; otherwise, infrastructure cannot catch up with the development of financial services.

Huawei Solution

Huawei proposed an Agile Network solution, including high-performance S5700-LI series switches as access switches and eSight as the Network Management System (NMS). The S5700-LI supports 10GE SFP+ uplink ports and PoE/PoE+ ports which provide power for IP phones, cameras and Wi-Fi APs. eSight helps BPCE to easily manage networks.

Benefits

The S5700-LI supports GE downlink and 10GE uplink transmission that meets the requirements of a richer range of applications like High Definition (HD) video and high-performance Wi-Fi. The S5700-LI also enables PoE+ 30 W power supply to some high performance, high power consumption devices like new Wi-Fi APs.

The S5700-LI supports Huawei Intelligent Stack (iStack) technology to implement higher scalability. iStack is a Huawei-developed technology which enables multiple S5700-LI switches to function as a single logical switching device. This simplifies network management and facilitates network expansion.

As France’s second largest banking group, BPCE has very high security requirements. The S5700-LI supports CPU-defense to protect the device, implements port security and broadcast storm control to protect the network, and allows comprehensive user authentication, including 802.1x, MAC authentication, and Portal authentication, to prevent unauthenticated terminals from attacking the network.

Besides, the S5700-LI supports an innovative Advanced Hibernation Management (AHM) technology and is designed with energy-saving technologies including Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE), port power detection, dynamic CPU frequency adjustment, and device sleeping. These technologies reduce power consumption by flexibly adjusting power depending on the Up/Down link states, presence/absence of optical modules, shutdown and undo shutdown operations on ports, and peak/off-peak hours. AHM helps BPCE to further reduce costs.

Finally, Huawei eSight helps BPCE to simplify network management. eSight supports centralized management of enterprise basic networks, unified management of Huawei network devices, WLAN monitoring and configuration management, as well as network quality monitoring and analysis. In addition, eSight provides a flexible and open platform, which enables enterprises to customize an intelligent network management system. By using eSight’s configuration management functions, BPCE simplifies new configurations to meet the requirements for flexible policy adjustment.

With Huawei’s help, BPCE has successfully renewed their branch networks, achieving another milestone of their digital transformation.