Banco BV gets cost savings and efficient cloud cost management using a FinOps framework
About Banco BV
Considered one of Brazil’s largest private banks, Banco BV provides innovative solutions to meet customer needs in every market segment where it operates.
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Contact usBy implementing a FinOps model based on Google Cloud solutions, the company ensured financial efficiency and a culture change, combining technology, finance, and business.
Google Cloud results
- Scalability and more financially efficient operations
- Asset reservation management and pricing models with cost savings of 30%
- Access to data, increased transparency, and cost optimization thanks to the creation of Fórum FinOps
- Improved cloud cost financial visibility using management dashboards
Increased financial efficiency in cloud management
Banco BV, which has been in the market for 30 years, offers corporate banking and investment services, asset management, private banking, and financing. It also invests in startup and fintech development and provides credit and other products to help customers achieve their goals.
Standing out as one of Brazil’s largest private banks, the organization constantly seeks transformations and solutions to further effectively drive technological innovation.
A major step in that journey was migrating its infrastructure to Google Cloud. Previously, the bank relied on another cloud provider; however, it became interested in Google Cloud as it needed to ensure more flexibility and improved asset allocation.
Banco BV’s aims for its long-term journey with Google Cloud are promoting the intensive use of data intelligence to transform the customer experience, increasing the potential of open platforms, creating new digital products, and honing the company’s data science models.
Then, the company faced the new challenge of building a team to implement a FinOps culture driven by adopting financial management best practices for its technology infrastructure. Due to Banco BV’s increased investment in its digital and strategic evolution, it needed enhanced cost visibility to create cost optimization and reallocation processes.
"Our story with Google Cloud began in early 2021. The company’s FinOps department was created right after that to ensure control over costs and efficient expenses."
—Fabio Arnoni, Governance and FinOps Coordinator, Banco BVFinOps in the cloud and smart use of solutions
The cloud FinOps concept involves an operational framework and a culture change based on technology, finance, and business. Its goals include fostering financial accountability and accelerating business value generation.
The payment journey, visibility strategy, cost optimization, and other operational FinOps activities require the work of analysts skilled in diverse areas, such as finance, development, cloud technology, processes, and capability planning. To implement that model, Banco BV was supported by Google Cloud’s solutions and experts.
Looker Studio was one of the tools used to increase financial accountability among teams, with the aim of sharing a range of cloud consumption approaches in the organization. During the FinOps framework structuring journey, those insights proved essential to reveal consumption data and opportunities to improve the cloud environment.
Another strategy was using BigQuery to extract data in various operations, such as the chargeback process. With that solution, the teams activated an asset that provides a specific overview of how Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is used.
The structuring of the FinOps department and its activities was organized under the Scrum model, an agile project management and planning method. Projects are split into two-week cycles, dubbed sprints, each corresponding to a series of activities. In Banco BV’s case, professionals attend 15-minute daily meetings, as well as weekly meetings.
As a result, employees with varying skills can converse and exchange experiences. These transformations also enabled the company to predict expenses, which increases the teams’ decision-making power. Democratizing cloud cost data and everyone beginning to collaborate with each other marked a watershed moment in the process.
"We promoted workshops extensively, particularly last year, to build strategies across our teams. Together with Google Cloud, we also conducted an analysis, tackling needs and assessing essential data to track the bank’s progress. Our organization also benefited from the training sessions and consulting provided by Cloud Hero."
—Anna Alvarenga, FinOps Tech Lead, Banco BVPositive results on the road to evolution
The new FinOps culture’s benefits include increased market competitiveness, quick delivery, flexibility, and speed, enabled by a new environment. This leads to faster value generation for end customers.
Other relevant outcomes include scalability and cost optimization, as the company pays only for the cloud assets it uses. The Google Cloud-based operational framework also provides essential elements to increase efficiency across several activities.
These include the Recommender service and GKE features to resize excess or idle assets, and the use of Cloud Scheduler to program the turndown of instances in testing environments when they are not used.
Asset reserve management and pricing models to optimize the use of Cloud SQL and Compute Engine, another good solution, generated 30% in cost savings in the institution’s monthly billing.
But perhaps one of the most significant changes was the introduction of regular result presentations for team members through Fórum FinOps.
"Fórum FinOps was created due to the need and the requirement to show cost optimization opportunities. Everyone involved gained access to the data and began discussing and acting on those analyses. Currently, new employees are introduced to that culture from day one through an onboarding process."
—Renato Justino, Cloud FinOps Product Owner, Banco BVAs for future plans, the company is operating with the most optimistic projections. The goal focuses on recommendations to improve tool use and communication between Banco BV and Google Cloud’s experts to increase maturity in data consumption and the cloud’s financial management.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Banco BV
Considered one of Brazil’s largest private banks, Banco BV provides innovative solutions to meet customer needs in every market segment where it operates.