Technological milestones in 2014
Evolving year after year. Throughout its existence Bankinter has maintained a strategy of constant evolution of its technological architecture. The best example of this business strategy is the fact that it was the first bank to introduce both online and mobile banking in Spain. These and other actions carried out have led to Bankinter being recognised in the market for its ability to penetrate new market niches thanks to its determination to be at the forefront of technology and towards its multi-channel strategy. Technology is therefore an area in which the Bank has a competitive edge from which to face the challenges of the coming years with success.
The platforms through which Bankinter offers its customers remote services, ranging from the corporate or transactional website (bankinter. com), through the online broker (broker. bankinter.com) to the business services area (empresas.bankinter.com), were strengthened in 2014 using the latest technologies in the market, many of them designed for areas other
than financial.
The Bankinter Group's IT infrastructure, managed through its IT subsidiary Gneis Global Services, has succeeded in obtaining advantages such as: capacity to grow to cater to an increase in the inflow of customers, improved response times, 24-hours-a-day operating availability in the event of any kind of incident, and lower system costs.
Also, groundbreaking task management technologies have been incorporated to improve employees' working environment and increase their productivity. Improvements have also been made to the data management and storage procedures in order to achieve the highest levels of security, preventing the Bank's systems or services from being affected by any vulnerability, so that they are always protected against any kind of attack.
New workstation platform (GEN project)
Over the course of 2014, Bankinter improved the working environment of all its employees by incorporating the latest technological innovations.
Working environments for new needs. Throughout 2014, placed great emphasis on improving its personnel's working environment. In this regard it implemented the most technologically advanced business operating system, with a workstation solution that responds to the day-to-day needs of the Bank's various employees. Modern equipment was made available, ranging from tablets and lighter and more easily portable laptops, through wide touch-screens to the most powerful computers on the market. All this while maintaining identical systems and tools in each configurations. The plan will cover the Bank's entire workforce, which entails installing 4,000 PCs, more than 500 laptops, 400 tablets for collecting digital biometric signatures and more than 2,000 mobile phones, as well as renewing the meeting rooms and booths.
As well as introducing new IT equipment and implementing the new operating system, Bankinter also replaced the mobile terminals with new ones with better perform
Data management and storage
Cutting-edge technological solutions. In parallel with the renovation of the workstations, during the year Bankinter installed the latest technological solutions, with the highest levels of security in the area of management and storage of the Bank's data. As well as improving performance by more than 10% and increasing the security of the Bank's systems, these solutions also provide maximum availability for data management, reducing recovery times in the event of disaster to less than one hour.
To achieve this it was necessary to develop a new network architecture, much more flexible and better suited to the needs of the new virtual processing environments, maintaining the
current high levels of availability with 10Gbps access ports and 40Gbps trunk ports. These changes have brought about a significant increase in available bandwidth and data processing speed.
Integration of Mercavalor
An ever greater offering of services. In December 2013 Bankinter completed the acquisition of Mercavalor, which has become Bankinter's securities company. The integration, which serves to complement the offering of services and move it towards a more global format geared to asset management and specialist advisory services, posed a technological challenge from the systems point of view.
The IT infrastructure managed by Gneis Global Services made it possible to renew Mercavalor's technology and bring it into line with the standards used in the Group, in a process which will improve both the quality of service of the securities company and the efficiency of its operations.
Furthermore , the integration process will enable it to advance towards a new business model and better service quality, so helping Mercavalor to pass the break even point in 2015.
IT security
Bankinter is the first Spanish financial institution to receive certification from BSI, the British Standards Institution, for both its Information Security and Business Continuity management systems concurrently.
The most secure bank. Although Bankinter has one of the most secure platforms in the market, during 2013 it achieved further improvement in the implementation of controls and measures designed to manage technological risks. A commitment that has been backed by the prestigious British Standards Institution (BSI) in certifying it under ISO 22301:2012 and ISO/IEC 27001:2013, which confirm that Bankinter has an Information Security Management System and a Business Continuity Management System in place in accordance with the requirements of the two standards.
In 2014 Bankinter became the first Spanish financial institution to receive both certifications at the same time, which demonstrates its determination to offer the best international
practices in managing security of information, business continuity and risk management.
We would also highlight the system for the prevention of online fraud which protects
Bankinter's customers. This system provides real-time monitoring of movements of funds from websites made available to customers, all sessions being analysed and marked with a confidence score. Every month millions of customer sessions operating on our websites order hundreds of thousands of transactions. The system, which was developed entirely in-house, is based on an ‘expert system’ model which automatically analyses a series of variables and takes decisions based on defined criteria for the prevention of online fraud. In case of doubt, an analyst reviews the transaction and takes the decision in a matter of seconds.
The high degree of reliability of the system, with fewer than 0.7% of transactions being marked as suspicious or fraudulent, means that the Bank maintains excellent levels of security in its transactions, with practically no impact on customer's legitimate operations.
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