BCI invests in Microsoft Azure Stack Hub for hybrid cloud benefits

Transforming operations to achieve excellence

Banco de Crédito e Inversiones (BCI) regards itself as a unique player in the financial services industry because of its strong corporate focus on people—whether they’re employees, customers, or members of the communities where the bank operates. With headquarters in Chile and offices in four other South American countries, the United States, and China, BCI offers a wide range of products and services to different market segments.

BCI strives to be a leader in innovation, accessibility, and customer experience. To achieve these goals, the bank has implemented a comprehensive digital transformation strategy. “A strong technological foundation is essential for us to respond in a timely manner to the needs and expectations of our customers, our partners, and our employees,” says Patricio Subiabre, Chief Operating and Technology Officer at Banco de Crédito e Inversiones. “We want to provide omnichannel experiences and create value for customers in a way that continues to promote and enhance our strong relationships with them.”

BCI began its digital transformation journey in 2015 when it recognized that, although it was a successful bank, it needed to change to remain competitive. BCI noticed its customers comparing their experiences with BCI not just to those with other banks, but also to their experiences with leading-edge technology and consumer companies.

“We began to question whether our existing approach would allow us to provide the differential value we want to offer our customers,” says Subiabre. “We concluded that continuous incremental improvement was not the answer. We needed disruptive innovation and a permanent culture of change and innovation. Digital transformation isn’t just a project for us, it’s a way of life.”

Seeking better customer experiences through technology

To realize the full benefits of its digital makeover, BCI looked to the cloud. After evaluating options from major cloud providers, BCI chose Microsoft Azure as its trusted cloud platform. “Azure has the computing power and features we need,” says Subiabre. “Equally important is Microsoft’s own culture of transformation—Microsoft understands what we’re trying to achieve as a company.” 

The advantages of being in Azure touch all aspects of the company and propel BCI down its digital transformation path. “Migrating to Azure accelerates our transformation by giving us access to state-of-the-art software tools and services that facilitate our transition into a data-driven company,” says Subiabre. “We can now bring new products to market faster, boost our operational efficiency and flexibility, and improve the customer experience.”

The bank puts security and privacy at the center of everything it does, and it felt that Azure offers a level of built-in security that financial services companies need from the cloud. The bank also wanted the flexibility to move to the public cloud at its own speed, while maintaining certain applications and data on-premises to accommodate performance, security, or regulatory requirements. 

BCI found an ideal solution to its security and technological needs in Azure Stack Hub, which companies use to gain full advantage of Azure services and capabilities in an on-premises environment, in the cloud, or in a combination of both. The bank uses Azure Stack Hub to deploy hybrid applications and run them consistently across location boundaries.

“Particularly when it comes to security, Azure Stack Hub plays a critical role for us,” says German Matosas, Head of Architecture and Cloud Platform at Banco de Crédito e Inversiones. “We run workloads as if they were in the public cloud, but we keep them on an internal private cloud. It doesn’t affect the way we develop and deploy software—it’s the same experience whether the target environment is public or private.”

Building the right cloud setup

BCI developed a hybrid setup using four instances of Azure Stack Hub for production and preproduction environments. The company is also moving from a traditional monolithic architecture to a microservices architecture, using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) running on both Azure Stack Hub and the Azure public cloud. The Azure-based infrastructure powers the bank’s mobile apps and commercial business systems and supports 20 million transactions a month.

In addition to the proper technological setup, BCI’s cloud journey has required a certain level of transformation within the company to adapt to working with a hybrid cloud environment. At the same time that it moved to Azure Stack Hub, BCI also switched from outsourced IT management to in-house management. This meant that the company needed to get employees up to speed with the technologies.

“We’ve changed our processes and structures now that we’re on Azure and Azure Stack Hub,” says Eduardo Diaz, Computing Operations Manager at Banco de Crédito e Inversiones. “We have a cloud service center of expertise and a training network of more than 100 employees who help foster the new agile, cloud-first mindset we’ve been adopting.”

Taking cloud benefits to the bank

Benefits have accrued quickly for BCI now that the bank has moved to Azure and deployed Azure Stack Hub. From internal developers to external customers, all of the bank’s stakeholders are noticing improvements. “Now that we’re on Azure Stack Hub, we have more agile development processes that accelerate our product release cycles, which promotes better customer satisfaction,” says Diaz. “We’ve also learned a lot about our customers’ behaviors, and we can put that information to good use and improve our products even more.”

Adds Matosas, “We’ve found the whole Azure platform to be very reliable and stable, and it gets better with each release. In fact, we have statistics showing that when we enabled Azure Stack Hub, customer satisfaction went up. It’s very clear. We’re delivering a better experience for our customers through the reliability and performance of Azure Stack Hub and the new functionality our team is building on top of it.”

When COVID-19 started affecting global commerce, BCI found that its Azure investment helped the bank adjust to the rapidly changing needs of the marketplace and the increased use of mobile banking. “The government released a lot of new tools, credits, and other resources to help consumers,” says Diaz. “Thanks to the agility we get from using Azure Stack Hub, we quickly implemented new products that help our customers take best advantage of those government resources, and the platform scaled and remained stable even when demand spiked.”

BCI plans to continue its cloud transformation journey by digitizing even more of its processes and systems. “With Azure Stack Hub in place and access to Azure Stack Edge, we are well prepared for future digital disruptions like 5G technologies,” says Matosas. “I feel very comfortable that we can support innovations like intelligent cloud and intelligent edge and continue to maintain appropriate security and regulatory compliance.”

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