Crédit Mutuel turns to IBM for major digital revamp
Intentionally big move
France’s Crédit Mutuel has selected IBM Cloud, Watson and cybersecurity technologies as part of a major digital overhaul.
The bank has 12 million customers and says it will now deploy IBM Watson’s artificial intelligence (AI) solutions across all of its business lines – consumer credit, personal protection, health, payment instruments and risk and compliance.
Nicolas Théry, chairman of Crédit Mutuel, says: “Through this new joint-construction stage, Crédit Mutuel is enabled to transform its productivity gains and growth opportunities and pave the way for new services.”
For its next wave, Crédit Mutuel will combine multiple technologies from IBM – Cloud, Security, and Watson – for its operations.
For example, Crédit Mutuel explains that it will now be able to reassign 200,000 working days annually towards training, upgrading advisors’ skills and expanding sales activities. This follows last year’s Watson deployment of an e-mail analyser and virtual assistant to 20,000 advisors.
In the IBM Cloud, Watson services will be secured in an encrypted, dedicated and isolated environment in France with back-up in Germany.
Additionally, it has chosen IBM QRadar Security Intelligence to collect “all major cybersecurity information across the world”, and make it available to its security analysts.
The bank is also using IBM MaaS360 to protect 10,000 advisors’ mobile phones used across the overall group.
Crédit Mutuel will continue to use an IBM Mainframe for customer data and support large business process operations.
The Cognitive Factory
If that’s not enough, IBM Services and Crédit Mutuel are inaugurating the Cognitive Factory, bringing together AI engineers and line of business experts from Crédit Mutuel into a partnership with IBM staff.
This is a result of a two-year experiment conducted through their joint taskforce.
The 100 people, within Euro-Information, the fintech IT group of Crédit Mutuel, will focus on skills, training and recruitment for the bank’s technical team.
Crédit Mutuel and IBM are also creating and running a joint university programme to recruit interns and experts to provide them with dual competencies in banking and AI, as well as mainframe.
Incidentally, as reported yesterday (23 May), IBM revealed a set of investments and initiatives in France that will create 1,800 jobs during the next two years, in areas like AI, blockchain, cloud computing and the internet of things (IoT).
