Groupe BPCE

Challenges: Meet changing consumer expectations, deliver flawless application performance, break down IT silos

In 2015, Groupe BPCE—a leading, multi-brand banking and insurance group in France—established the joint venture BPCE Infogérance & Technologies (BPCE-IT) to bring together the organization’s IT subsidiaries and carry out all IT production activities for the Groupe’s banks. The organization was born with the ambition to consolidate infrastructures and combine purchasing power to improve service quality, create economies of scale, and share opportunities for innovation across the various businesses.

With nearly 80 percent of France’s Internet users visiting an online banking site at least monthly, optimizing application performance is of critical strategic importance for BPCE-IT. And not only do huge numbers of French consumers use online banking applications, but they also have high expectations of them. One study found that 63 percent of consumers say flawless performance of banking and mobile apps is essential, and 30 percent say they would even change their bank if its mobile app failed to meet expectations.

But delivering seamless application performance—especially in a large, diversified organization like Groupe BPCE—is highly complex. Even just identifying application performance issues before they impact end users can be a significant challenge. In fact, most application performance problems are actually reported by end users, which can cause customer satisfaction to dangerously deteriorate.

In addition to the challenges with identifying and solving application performance problems, BPCE-IT was also experiencing a phenomenon many IT organizations can relate to: The passing of responsibility back and forth between teams internally. As Rachid Hmiche, BPCE-IT’s Expert Architect for Tools & DevOps adds, “The result was that 31 percent of incidents were not resolved within a month or were never resolved at all.”

“With AppDynamics, we have reduced our resolution time by more than 70%”

Rachid Hmiche

Architecte Référent Outils & DevOps @Groupe BPCE

Solution: Identify the root cause of performance issues, measure application performance in real time, gain end-to-end visibility

In order to optimize the end user experience for Groupe BPCE’s customers and bring added value to the businesses it serves, BPCE-IT made the strategic decision to improve how it monitored, captured, and interpreted application performance data. Also recognizing the need to accelerate the organization’s digital transformation to meet changing consumer expectations and stay ahead of the competition, BPCE-IT began exploring how it could leverage application performance management (APM) solutions to deliver a seamless digital banking experience.

BPCE-IT evaluated two APM market leaders—one of which was AppDynamics—for several weeks to determine which solution would best fit their needs. “We wanted to check everything and try it out ourselves,” says Hmiche. And from the beginning of this evaluation phase, AppDynamics stood out as the clear frontrunner.

Prior to testing, BPCE-IT identified performance problems with one of its legacy applications, but could not determine the root cause—a huge problem since the speedy detection and resolution of incidents is a critical driver of customer satisfaction. But with AppDynamics, BPCE-IT resolved these incidents in record time. “We reduced our problem-solving time by over 70 percent. With the dashboards available in AppDynamics, our developers can now measure the performance of applications throughout the implementation process and gain insight into critical IT and business indicators, including customer experience,” adds Hmiche.

Benefits: Optimized the customer experience, accelerated digital transformation, reduced IT administrative burden

“With AppDynamics, we can finally focus on improving performance as well as customer experiences.”

Rachid Hmiche

Architecte Référent Outils & DevOps @Groupe BPCE

By leveraging AppDynamics’ APM solutions, BPCE-IT has been able to more effectively support the needs of the broader organization and accelerate its digital transformation, while also improving collaboration internally. “Now we share information across all functions and can get in touch with the right person immediately. Everyone talks to and understands each other. It isn't fiction anymore, it's actually working,” says Hmiche.

Having a robust APM solution in place also allows BPCE-IT to meet both its IT requirements and strategic business objectives. As Hmiche notes, “With AppDynamics we were able to immediately improve the performance of our applications and optimize the customer experience. What’s more, this solution has freed up our time. We now spend less time searching for the cause of a problem and can fully focus on innovation in order to improve services for our customers and support banking advisers in their day-to-day work.”

And with a world-class customer support team and extensive knowledge base, the AppDynamics platform is backed by the technical expertise needed to help BPCE-IT maximize the business impact of its APM investment. From the beginning, an AppDynamics expert worked closely with BPCE-IT to gain an understanding of their unique challenges, customizing the platform and its reporting accordingly. Hmiche concludes, “I have rarely had this sort of relationship with a supplier. The relationship we established with AppDynamics and their consultants was invaluable and became a critical factor in our organization’s success with APM.”

Driving Innovations That Improve the Customer Experience and Business Outcomes

Due to their success with AppDynamics APM, BPCE-IT is now looking to expand its use of the AppDynamics platform. Namely, the organization is exploring how AppDynamics’ Business iQ can help them further improve the customer experience—and their bottom line—by providing clear, actionable correlations between application performance, user experience, and business outcomes.