Banco BV: Enhancing its credit platform with cloud-based, self-managed services
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 Google Cloud’s native services, Banco BV now operates on a more stable platform, offering faster response times and contributing to customer satisfaction.
Google Cloud results
- Ensured scalability and boosted performance, driving team productivity
- Improved user experience, with reduced wait times for credit assessments
- Fully self-managed solution, so that teams can focus their efforts on core business activities
- Significantly increased availability, reducing business impact
- Enhanced data security
Application’s overall response time improved fourfold
As one of Brazil’s largest private banks, Banco BV has been in the market for 30 years and 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.
The organization is increasingly innovating around technology for its products and services. A major example is its Credit Decisioning Platform, known in Portuguese as the PDEC, which is used as Banco BV’s main credit approval system.
Implemented in 2019, this system drives automated decision-making in all credit lines offered by the financial institution, including retail and wholesale activities. Besides personal and SMB credit services, other solutions, including payroll services, credit cards, student loans, car financing, and the funding of projects and installations of panels for photovoltaic power generation, are also offered through the PDEC.
As time went by, the PDEC brought some IT-related challenges. The system ran on a cloud environment, which featured services by multiple vendors and open-source solutions. The organization also used container-based tools to perform messaging processes and generate event-related temporary memory.
However, the solutions could not deal with the huge leap of around 10,000% in the number of applications after Banco BV’s initiatives between 2019 and 2022 led to a more accelerated use of the platform. And this figure has continued to grow in 2023. The organization experienced some delays in obtaining the requested information, which ultimately led to less-than-happy customers.
This was reinforced by another issue of concern for the bank’s teams: a platform downtime event that lasted about five hours. Looking to solve this problem and ensure scalability, the company decided to turn to Google Cloud’s self-managed services.
Easier management for a better use of resources
The aim of the migration, which kicked off in September 2022, was to optimize the PDEC’s operation. By adopting Pub/Sub and Memorystore, which are self-managed, serverless solutions, Banco BV’s development and IT teams could focus on the company’s key activities.
The bank was supported at all times by Google Cloud experts. Both architecture and product teams followed the design and implementation stage closely. The deployment and post-operation stages engaged the Support and Technical Account Management (TAM) teams, including major event management services.
"The support provided by Google Cloud’s technical teams was essential in setting up tasks related to Pub/Sub and Memorystore. After testing and a staged transition, we completed our journey in only 18 business days."
—Anderson Takami, System Development Manager, Banco BVConcerning the role Pub/Sub plays in the operation of the PDEC, the tool is used for asynchronous messaging, separating message-generating services from processing services. This decoupling makes the platform operation more resilient.
Memorystore is a fully managed database service. In Banco BV, it was essential to integrate, self-manage, and improve the performance of Redis, the open-source cache store used for the PDEC.
Both tools helped the organization scale PDEC products without worrying about whether the adjacent solutions could support the volume of operations. Now, the risk of a critical downtime event, like the one experienced before the migration, is virtually zero.
Another benefit from adopting Google Cloud native tools was the significant improvement in the PDEC’s SLAs: 100% in the last few months. In addition, thanks to the self-managed services, the team no longer needs to invest a lot of effort in environment monitoring and maintenance.
Process stability, monitoring and maintenance
Adopting the solutions has brought many positive results. The bank has not experienced any more downtime events due to a lack of PDEC resources, which has led to excellent service performance in terms of scalability, stability, and response times (which have increased fourfold). It can now support millions of applications daily.
"With Pub/Sub and Memorystore, we can use components with alert configuration, ensure compliance with security requirements, scale, and boost performance, resulting in a significant improvement in team productivity."
—Emerson Cantalice, Tech Lead, Banco BVThe PDEC’s faster responses have ultimately impacted customer satisfaction. The platform now offers the stability levels expected by the business team and ease-of-use in daily data processes.
Integrating Google Cloud alerts in support channels is yet another benefit, helping identifying issues related to migrated products. Maintenance and backup tasks are regularly performed in a self-managed way by cloud-based tools, at the intervals scheduled by Banco BV experts.
Moreover, while Pub/Sub has enabled a reduction in latency, Memorystore uses VPC controls and IAM integration to provide more data security.
"Today the importance of the platform for Banco BV is huge. Any decision related to the PDEC and Google Cloud reaches executive levels. Migrating messaging tasks to cloud resources, which helps us focus on the PDEC’s core activities, also leads to more trust in the business."
—Edson Sumensari, System Development Coordinator, Banco BVTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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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.