CASE STUDY
C
redit Agricole Group is a leading
retail bank and the largest asset
manager in Europe. With more than
50 million customers, 7,000 branches across
54 countries, a market cap of €23+ billion
and a diverse range of products and services
including retail, asset management and
insurance, its mission to grow its business
requires agile and secure IT infrastructure.
With ever-growing customer demand, credit
card services are a key driver of the bank’s
success. To keep dynamic growth and a
competitive advantage, however, Credit
Agricole Group has to meet strict regulatory
compliance and industry standards.
Secure archiving of structured credit card
or payment transaction data is a must. A
new business need is to securely archive
unstructured data, such as digitally signed
documents from retail banking business
processes. This is critical to its challenge.
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INTELLIGENTCIO
Business challenges
In 2010, the European Union introduced
regulations governing the management
and retention of Single European Payment
Area (SEPA) financial transactions, an
initiative designed to standardise the
framework for making and processing
electronic payments across Europe. Failure
by credit card issuers (and other businesses)
to meet SEPA regulations could result in
prosecution and heavy fines.
Credit card issuers, including Credit Agricole
Group, also have to be certified as meeting
PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data
Security Standards) requirements. This
global range of standards works to ensure
the safety and security of cardholder data
no matter where it is held across the globe.
Card issuers unable to meet PCI-DSS can
be subject to penalties and costs, could be
stripped of their certification and lose the
right to issue credit cards. To meet strict
compliance, it was paramount for Credit
Agricole Group to securely and regularly
archive credit card transaction data for as
long as 10 years, while facilitating quick and
easy data retrieval.
The Group was already considering a
replacement of its legacy archiving solution.
However, because of looming SEPA deadlines,
that search became vitally important.
“We required an enterprise-level, electronic
archiving solution to securely store
billions of transactions every year while
meeting all regulatory and certification
requirements, which could be deployed
quickly to meet SEPA deadlines and which
would enable thousands of internal users
across the bank’s footprint to quickly
find and retrieve specific structured or
unstructured data assets,” said Gregoire
Lundi, in charge of Service Offerings for
www.intelligentcio.com