BNP Paribas Group is the largest bank in the EU, and a leader on the world stage. It counts 193,000 employees, including 25,000 in France, spread over 1,870 sites. The Group chose Orange Business to provide end-to-end support to migrate branches in France to SD-WAN technology.
A fluid and agile network adapted to BNP Paribas’s digital transformation
To be “the bank for a changing world”, BNP Paribas is looking ahead to the uses of tomorrow and is making innovation an integral part of its corporate culture, in order to offer the best customer experience. This culture of innovation is also an asset for the Group itself, with the deployment of high-performance tools for 25,000 employees in France to optimize the management of Cloud data flows.
To accelerate its digital transformation, BNP Paribas required an agile technological foundation that would enable it to rapidly and easily deploy the highest digital standards across all of its sites, for customers and employees. The Group, therefore, turned to the Flexible SD-Wan solution offered by Orange Business with Cisco, which provides 10 times more speed. This extended software network offers a programmable and scalable architecture, perfectly adapted to companies in the midst of rapid digital transformation. The fast, easy deployment of large numbers of services enables administrators to check that the infrastructure is running smoothly and to repair potential glitches. Depending on the size of the network, it is also possible to optimize the performance of applications, for an improved user experience.
BNP Paribas now enjoys access to a native, multi-cloud, multi-application hybrid network and cloud connectivity adapted to the different services offered by the Group. Finally, intelligent routing will optimize the bandwidth required for each application, for even greater fluidity. Thanks to Orange Business, network bandwidth has increased tenfold.
More than 3,600 WAN access lines were deployed i.e. two per branch, one of which is used for internet access. Given the nature of BNP Paribas activities and the criticality of the data collected, firewalls have been integrated to guarantee the highest standards of security.
The Orange Business teams, with Cisco, have shown an impressive ability to understand our business needs, beyond their area of IT expertise, and to think several steps ahead, to support our digital transformation from end-to-end.
Bernard Gavgani, Chief Information Officer for the BNP Paribas Group
Collaboration, a key factor in the project’s success
The successful deployment of SD-WAN relied, first and foremost, on the collaboration between the stakeholders. Orange Business experts lent their support to the BNP Paribas teams at every stage in the project, with Cisco as a partner, to build the solution and identify what functions should be developed as a priority. Thanks to careful planning, SD-WAN was deployed to every agency without an interruption of service for customers.
Bernard Gavgani, CIO at BNPP Group explains “Finding a partner that already had experience in Europe and was recognized for its SD-WAN expertise and operational capacity was crucial. Orange Business emerged as that trusted partner, for us. The Orange teams, with Cisco, showed an impressive ability to understand our business needs, beyond their area of IT expertise, and to think several steps ahead, to support our digital transformation from end-to-end. This close collaboration between our teams, from the very start of the project, was one of the keys to its success and its smooth execution”.
So mission accomplished for this large-scale SD-WAN project. And what’s next? Orange Business will continue to support BNP Paribas through its digitization in the retail banking market in France. “[Because] an in-depth understanding of our customers’ core business is essential for developing relevant and innovative solutions together,” says Nadine Foulon-Belkacémi, Executive Vice-President, Directorate of Major Accounts, Orange Business.
