Short introduction

Patria Bank is a Romanian bank, founded in 1993 under the name Romexterra Bank, later named Nextebank. Starting with April 30, 2014 the bank's main shareholder is the investment fund Emerging Europe Accession Fund (EEAF). Emerging Europe Accession Fund is an investment fund that brings together as investors, key international financial institutions (multilateral development banks) and is the third private equity fund, managed by Axxess Capital.

As manager of investment funds, Axxess Capital has a history of over 15 years of investment experience in Romania and Central-Eastern European region, which includes investments in over 35 companies in Romania and other countries in Southeast Europe.

Challenge

When demand for increased productivity, collaboration and expanding white space customer portfolio hit the wall of a legacy and costly IT infrastructure and customer loyalty begin to seriously affect the business, Patria Bank knew it was time to make a change.

A system meant to maintain the IT environment was in place consisting of heterogeneous technologies like Linux for e-mail, multiple types of fixed and mobile equipment for video-conferencing and a certificate based solution for mobile device management. Email communications didn’t had the level of usability like Office 365 offers today, and IT staff was spending most of their day reacting to critical issues.

Solution

Soon after, an integrated solution consisting of Office 365 and Enterprise Mobility Suite was the first choice to replace Linux and the existing ad-hoc mobile device management solution, creating a competitive advantage that Patria Bank used to launch in only 3 months a new set of services for customer segments that before were hard to reach.

Leveraging the extensive resources set from the Partner Portal in alignment with Microsoft strategy, we were able to present a quick proof of concept and extensive TCO gain conducting to more than 270 seats into production in January 2015. With this new business model the customer average service time is now significantly improved.

“Until Cosmin and Catalin from Star Storage came to us and demonstrated how we can leverage Microsoft Office 365 and EMS to take to the next level our productivity and customer satisfaction, our banking business was dealing with a Linux based e-mail solution, which required huge resources and troubleshooting efforts, a hard to maintain heterogeneous video-conferencing solution resulting in communications disruptions with our customers and a prone to risk and data loss end-user device enrollment.

Using the latest Microsoft technologies we eliminated the maintenance costs associated with our legacy infrastructure. We now run more efficient operations, drive customer loyalty and upsell more easily while leveraging key insight and ensuring compliance. Now we can instantly scale out the solution to all users maintaining the highest levels of data privacy and security at a time when mobility and proximity to our clients are key competitive advantages. ”

George Simion, CIO Patria Bank.

Benefits

Adapt on the spot with the possibility to instantly scale out the solution to all users;
Faster setup and deployment process with more time available to focus on real business and customer engagement;
Better control on the documents with increased protection and possibility for classification;
100% cost predictable with a yearly cost per user, all services included;
Eliminate hardware and support costs, since the solutions is provided as a cloud service;
Highest level of data privacy and security standards with access to information from any place and any device based on security levels and user roles;
No cost for Back-up and Disaster Recovery – free services included in the solution;
Customer secured collaboration space on documents (proposals, documents, offers) and live interaction (Audio/Video conferencing) across multiple devices;
Internal portals, announcements (eg: sales portal, marketing materials, HR, Work Safety regulations);
Better and faster business decisions using a unified knowledge base across the entire organization and collaboration on customer business Intelligence solution for more in depth insights and predictive analytics;
Engaging working environment with approval workflows for modern internal processes (eg: vacation requests, expense requests);
Compliance with internal and external rules and regulations with auditable e-mail.