Cetelem is part of the BNP PARIBAS Group, the eighth largest bank in the world, of French
origin and we are the personal finance part of them.
Here in Brazil we are positioned as "B2B2C", so we don’t have a direct commercial relation
with the end customer, but through partners.
Our challenge and what brought us to Axway was the need, as IT, to be able to help build
new partnerships in a more efficient way.
Nowadays, what we want is to deliver a "self-service" business model in which while our commercial
areas are closing a partnership, the developers can already start working on an integration,
achieving a much shorter time-to-market, which is fundamental to the challenges that any
business has nowadays, in this world each time more digital, more accelerated.
And it was exactly the work that we did during a year and a half when we came to Axway with
the intention of putting together our API layer allowing this project to be complete,
which is a rather atypical project.
The quality of Axway's product and the support we had from Axway during the entire development
of the project, where more than simply a technology supplier, as we often have, was a partner
in building the solution.
So that made all the difference, because it was an extended team - with people from Cetelem
and people from Axway, and they were really able to build and operationalize the API Gateway
with a speed much higher than was foreseen.
And we were the first BNP group company to have our mainframe with a service layer, so
this allowed a lot of the more complicated work to be already done before and allowed
us to start at a more advanced level than if we were to start this discussion early
in the project.So it is fundamental for us to achieve this capillarity that can only
be achieved through partnerships.
These partnerships have to be simple, fast, economical, so that I can give this flexibility
to the business.
So once again, the fact that I have a technology that allow this interface to be simple is
fundamental to what we intend to achieve in the future.
It is a movement that is happening at BNP Paribas as a whole, APIs is a hot topic, not
only because of the PSD2 in Europe, but also because the subject of Open Banking is something
that is sweeping the banking world from end to end , and banks will either adapt or have
the often risk often of simply dying.We have started the project only two months ago, but
it’s a project that within two months has already placed the APIs in production, which
allow us to onboard a few partners and change the way they interact with us.We come from
a past experience of dealing with four months to integrate with partners, a very complex
integration scenario.
We’ve had this difficulty for a long time, but now we have a reality of weeks.
And why weeks?
Simply because it’s the time of development.
It’s the time it takes for the developer to access our portal, download the specifications,
build his development and deliver the project.
The biggest challenge was for us to start this project when I was travelling outside
of the country, but we were able, along with Axway expertise and the Cetelem team to develop
this project, even at distance.
The maturity and commitment of Axway and the commitment from Cetelem professionals, allowed
us to continue the project and deliver it even before the deadline.
This is certainly a successful accomplishment that we can take for the rest of our lives.
We are used to seeing the discussion in the market about microservices or traditional
services and we can see how important was to think and plan something robust, that ended
up giving us this possibility of creating an API in one week or two weeks, we can have
a new API in production.