When you walk into a Société Générale banking center, you enter a bright, open space, furnished with modern designs and an abundance of natural light. Customers sip coffee and enjoy beautiful views while meeting with their private or corporate bankers. Employees enjoy a modern work environment with accessible meeting spaces, interior offices and shared amenities.
Société Générale is a global bank supporting 31 million clients doing business in 67 countries. Imagine the complexity of managing such a large institution. What happens behind the scenes, when a customer requests an account statement, completes a trade or a new regulation is passed requiring compliance in a short time? How do they stay competitive?
Nicolas Verdier is the head of Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) for the Americas at Société Générale. Mr. Verdier discussed tough challenges the bank is facing in today’s digital, fast-changing economy. Société Générale must perform a daily balancing act to deliver exceptional customer service while also staying in compliance with rapidly changing government regulations.
Société Générale took on an IT modernization effort to meet these challenges. One of the hurdles faced by the IT department was that the business relied on manual processes, that addressed each request for a system changes on an individual project basis. Each request required a scheduled time slot on a server or even the deployment of a new server, which could take months. This impacted both internal and external services throughout the bank, potentially limiting the bank’s ability to compete in the global marketplace, to deliver high quality customer service or adhere to new regulations. Société Générale called on Dell to help them use technology to tackle these back-office challenges.
With help from Dell, Société Générale introduced a “self-service” model allowing users to self-provision virtual machines using Dell PowerEdge servers. The shift from the more complicated legacy processes to an automated IAAS model was easily achieved. Mr. Verdier praised the new model and the benefits to the company: “It’s about self-service, flexibility and customer experience.” He stressed the need to move quickly, rather than taking months to begin a project.
With the new “self-service” model, Societe Générale was able to impact the time to value in many of their departments. Let’s look at three examples:
- One of the bank’s top challenges is regulatory compliance. The internal development teams can meet regulation deadlines with the capability to build and deploy new applications within the time frame set by the regulatory bodies. Furthermore, the PowerEdge cyber-resilient architecture meets the strict security requirements that are part of the new regulations.
- Within the IT department, the flexibility and scalability of the servers allow stakeholders to rapidly develop APIs to patch, upgrade and backup workloads.
- In the high stakes world of high-frequency trading, milliseconds count, and the IT infrastructure has a direct impact on the business. Speed, scalability and low latency are critical to executing successful transactions. With PowerEdge servers, the Internal IT Development team can deliver new applications for market platforms in a few weeks, rather than six months.
Thanks to the automation of Société Générale’s infrastructure based on Dell PowerEdge servers, employees can rapidly design new programs or services to meet customer demands or regulatory requirements.
Read the case study to learn more about Société Générale’s Infrastructure as a Service and how the Dell PowerEdge team helps this international banking leader stay on top of the latest technologies.
