In response to the Mexican Federal Government and the World Bank’s Network of the People Program, BANSEFI needs to establish full banking services across Mexico. BANSEFI intends to have hundreds of savings branches that will provide services to 20 million people — often in areas where it is difficult for cars to travel and technology does not yet exist. In a very competitive bid process, the organization selected Atos Origin for data center management, network design and management, IT security and ongoing support services.

Banco del Ahorro Nacional y Servicios Financieros (BANSEFI) is a large savings institution in Mexico. The organization is committed to the success of the Network of People program, co-sponsored by the World Bank and by the Mexican Federal Government. This program is intended to strengthen Mexico’s savings and credit institutions, including those in marginal areas, and to improve access to financial services particularly for low-income constituents.

This World Bank project is creating efficiencies for distributing governmental programs, like the Sector of Savings program and Popular Credit program, which are directed to alleviate poverty and to generate development opportunities for low-income citizens.

Important elements of the BANSEFI participation in this program are that the organization must provide secure financial products and services to the low-income population and contribute to the integral money-management skills of these customers. Fully deployed, this project has the potential to touch the lives of more than 20 million Mexican nationals, including those working in foreign countries to support their families back home in Mexico.

The Business Challenges

BANSEFI is diligently promoting the benefits of the program such as reasonable interest rates and flexible terms while helping educate the Mexican public on the discipline of financial savings. The core business requirements of this national development project are to extend the security and provide robust central banking systems into the Mexican countryside. BANSEFI must offer corporate credit unions and their clients a trusting relationship as lack of trust has inhibited the prior use of financial services in the region.
 
To bring financial services to major cities and to very rural areas requires a wide selection of infrastructure technologies to be integrated into a cohesive and flexible solution. The required infrastructure must be robust to allow the institution to deepen and broaden its services, and must facilitate the provision of information in realtime that improves the quality of life for millions of BANSEFI customers.

To reach the target clients, BANSEFI must extend out into the marginally developed areas of Mexico. Often connected to the rest of the country by little more than a dirt road, many of these areas lack even the most rudimentary communications infrastructure typically associated with modern banking.

From being nurtured as a governmental agency, BANSEFI’s direction for eventual privatization requires establishing not just the banking systems, but also the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Data Warehouse (DW) systems to support the business.

Our Solution

Atos Origin has applied our proven international experience to build a state-of-the-art system that will carry BANSEFI and the people of Mexico into the future. Working with BANSEFI, Atos Origin designed and built a world-class system:

• Data Center: Within Atos Origin’s Data Center in Arlington, Texas, we built from greenfield the mainframe and midrange environments to support BANSEFI. Our hardened, purpose-built Tier IV facility provides continuous service under ISO 2001 certified processes with ISO 17799 level security.
• Mainframe: The main banking applications are hosted on multiple LPARs on a highly scalable IBM Z890.
• Midrange: BANSEFI’s ERP and DW systems are hosted on multiple LPARs on IBM p570 systems. Other midrange sys-tems support the mainframe banking system, including a Citrix server farm providing secure access from BANSEFI’sremote branch locations.
• Network Infrastructure: We designed and provide connectivity to BANSEFI’s headquarters in Mexico City by extending redundant links from its WAN to the Atos Origin Data Center. Most remote branch locations and third parties access the systems in the data center by secure, encrypted point-to-point VPN connections across the Internet. Branches can connect to the system from areas having minimal communications infrastructure, with some using satellite-based Internet connections where even phone lines do not exist.
• Help Desk Services: BANSEFI has a single point of contact Service Desk for all users. The Service Desk is located in Mexico and has Spanish-speaking analysts taking the calls.
• Security Services: Given the nature of BANSEFI’s business, we implemented special security tools and processes, as well as regular audits to guarantee the highest levels of security appropriate for a banking client. The satisfied auditors have included the World Bank.
• Monitoring and Reporting: Atos Origin monitoring and reporting tools provide us with the information needed to administer the environment and also provide BANSEFI real-time information on the status of critical elements of the system.
• Disaster Recovery: Our disaster recovery services for all production environments guarantee continuity of BANSEFI’s operations even in case of a disaster at the data center in Texas.
  

In addition to these services, Atos Origin is a trusted technology partner for BANSEFI, collaborating on the evaluation, design and optimization of elements of this new environment that promises to revolutionize the banking industry in Mexico.

The Results

Atos Origin measures our success according to BANSEFI’s ability to comply with the transformational goals of the World Bank program. The success is demonstrated through an ever-increasing number of new savings accounts and the greater fiscal efficiencies of Mexico-based businesses. Information Technology helps facilitate the World Bank vision. Working with BANSEFI, our goal is to help provide access to the savings and loan services by more people and increase efficiencies of transactions.
Since this project began in 2004, BANSEFI and Atos Origin have deployed beyond the originally planned locations with the following accomplishments:

• More than 600 branches are supported by the services, and more are planned
• More than 5 million new banking customers are served, and the number is growing
• Satellite-based Internet links are bringing the system to even the most remote locations
• BANSEFI’s key business processes were restructured and streamlined to meet the operational speeds of today’s global financial industry
• In cooperation with the main software vendor, we have tuned applications, resulting in significantly improved application availability during key banking hours
• A scalable, flexible, cost-effective infrastructure that has more than doubled in size as requirements underpins the services

 

The success to date has brought other Mexican financial institutions to join BANSEFI on this system. BANSEFI, with solutions provided by Atos Origin, is recognized globally in other countries where the World Bank’s programs are enhancing people’s lives in the developing world.