The interview on Banca Transilvania and technology, given to Ziarul Financiar by Leontin Toderici, Deputy CEO – Chief Operations Officer, Banca Transilvania.

Key takeaways:

• Banca Transilvania has grown significantly and we have reached the number-one position. Growth was initially organic, and we also made two acquisitions: Volksbank România (2015) and Bancpost (2018). After the two mergers, our customer base and branch network expanded significantly, and it became increasingly clear that we needed a flexible infrastructure able to respond at the click of a button to the bank’s needs. We then discussed this with our long-standing telecoms partner, Orange, explained what we needed, and it so happened they had a very new solution on the market. We did not hesitate to implement a new technology in Romania — not a first for us — with an eye to the bank’s future needs.

  
  

• Whenever we make a change, we look first and foremost at four criteria: simplicity, scalability, security and experience. On simplicity, the demos we ran with Orange showed SD-WAN was a big step forward: it makes it much easier to set up or relocate a branch, to interconnect with other applications, and to prepare for future cloud use. On scalability, as mentioned, we have grown: we have over 500 locations, a large and demanding customer base, and an ever-increasing number of connected devices, so the solution has to scale. On security — a bank’s defining attribute is safety. We operate on trust, and there is no trust without security. The solution performed very well on encryption and data protection. Last but not least, experience — meaning our technology team’s experience: how quickly they can respond to increasingly diverse business needs, how fast they can roll out new technology at the click of a button. SD-WAN really is a click: the GUI, the way definitions are created and replicated, is very straightforward — it’s a click.

  
  

• We focused on user experience and simplification, as well as centralized management. We are a bank with a very large network and nationwide coverage, and we also have a presence abroad, in Italy and the Republic of Moldova. We watch closely how quickly we can transfer know-how abroad or bring it back home. Centralized network-wide management and ease of operation were key reasons, as was the ability to provision a new branch quickly. Equally important were advanced security features — firewall, IPC, malware protection — and good visibility into network traffic. We often need to scan documents whose content and size vary, with multiple applications competing over the same communication links. Robust traffic prioritization and rapid scalability led us to this solution.

  
  

• Over the next 20 months, we plan to upgrade our core banking platform to make it truly omnichannel, and to launch a new online banking app.

The video interview can be watched on Ziarul Financiar .