INTRODUCTION
Crédit Agricole is a French bank that offers financial services on a global scale. It operates the world’s largest network of cooperative and mutual banks, including 39 regional banks in France. With 24 million customers advised by 72,000 people, the company must offer premium levels of services. The bank has, therefore, moved into “full agile mode,” with shared data platforms and a modernized information system.
Delivering greater autonomy through organizational ‘squads’ and ‘tribes’
Since 2020, Crédit Agricole has aimed to meet challenges like improving reliability, support, and productivity for employees and customers. This has led to the creation of Crédit Agricole Technologies and Services (CA-TS), which operates as the IT and technological partner of Crédit Agricole’s 39 regional banks.
CA-TS is responsible for the design, manufacture, and maintenance of the bank’s main information system. Its aim is to deliver overall improvements in availability, proximity, expertise, and advice and implement high-quality digital tools to enable simple and secure daily banking operations. Key to achieving this is monitoring the digital journeys of customers and employees. This is where MongoDB solutions come into play for CA-TS.
Securing a mortgage, for example, involves spending time with the customer—either face-to-face or remotely. The bank must then archive and make available all information relating to these and other operations. The same principle applies to the 27 other “digital journeys” that the bank offers.
To deliver this successfully, the CA-TS team is organized into “squads” and “tribes.” Within the technical-functional teams that ensure that existing applications remain operational, squads are the operational managers who are responsible for the developments and projects that impact these teams. Tribes are groups of squads that focus on cross-functional collaboration—truly multidisciplinary CA-TS teams whose strength lies in the diversity of their expertise.
Together, they develop solutions to keep the company running smoothly, with a philosophy of continuous improvement and partnership with other company stakeholders. Operational stability is an essential foundation of an IT partner’s activity, and the CA-TS team ensures that robust and effective tools, with MongoDB as their foundation, are available to every user, every day.
THE CHALLENGE
Setting up shared platforms
To make its mission successful, the CA-TS team harnessed the experience of the Crédit Agricole Infrastructure Platform (CA-GIP) team, which uses installed data platforms to provide shared technological bases for key business lines—and more specifically for MongoDB solutions. This model facilitates the design of shared service offerings capable of responding to different customer needs.
“It’s about implementing and deploying a complex technical solution through a set of tools that bring autonomy to the end-user,” explained Olivier Champailler, Squad Product Owner at CA-TS.
To achieve this, the CA-TS team adopted an incremental approach to building and enriching the new foundations: First, the team identified the main requirements. This led it to develop a list of possible solutions before reaching a decision. The team thenimplemeted the design and development phases with the aim of delivering a viable proof of concept (PoC) as quickly as possible.
When the PoC was approved by CA-TS and its squads, the team could then deploy various tools to ensure supervision and monitoring, provide resilience mechanisms, and build a rights model. The final step was production of the technical base, including a number of key prerequisites to be integrated into the group’s overall technical environments: service contracts, essential “golden” configuration rules to ensure service-level agreements, and effective documentation and APIs.
OUR SOLUTION
Achieving greater analysis through document-oriented database management
CA-TS built its service offering on MongoDB, a decision primarily based on MongoDB’s document-oriented database management system. CA-GIP’s existing experience of MongoDB also helped enable a quick and smooth project implementation.
Today, when the CA-TS solution runs on an internal infrastructure, it can connect to the internet and scale up without any difficulties. As a result, the CA-TS team can rely on MongoDB to deliver high availability, native replication, and other key functions. At the end of the chain, users can feed data into other analytical databases and apply it to data science applications.
Ultimately, CA-TS wanted to aggregate multiple pieces of data into a single document for analysis by clients and advisers, and to achieve this as quickly as possible. By using MongoDB, the team was able to meet its need seamlessly.
OUTCOME
Crédit Agricole is aiming for excellence in 2025 and beyond and is preparing to take advantage of the opportunities offered by AI and generative AI. With an omnichannel model comprising branch, telephone, and chat-based banking activities, the new IT infrastructure and MongoDB ecosystem developed by CA-TS will be ready to make the bank’s ambitions a reality.
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