Latin America. Moving from the manual system to a platform with traceability, with real-time reports and the possibility of growth in functions was undoubtedly a challenge.
Founded in September 1822, the Banco de la Provincia de Buenos Aires was the first financial institution in Latin America and the pioneer, also, in printing banknotes of national denomination. In 1863 the first three branches were opened, which today reach around 400, distributed in CABA and with logical preponderance on Buenos Aires soil.
The first improvements in the administration of the Bank came in 1969, with the incipient era of computing, and twenty years later, the first ATM was installed, whose number currently exceeds 1,600 units, approximately two hundred of these are extrabank.
At the beginning of the current decade, the management of the Entity has a substantial improvement in the bank's security monitoring systems, making a strategic decision to unify them in a single control center in the Central House building.
The monitoring operation began to be increasingly demanding, the existing equipment could not be adapted and was at the limit, so new options had to be sought. Among them, a comprehensive monitoring platform that could meet all the current requirements of the monitored systems and allow it, in addition to its permanent improvement in scalability and adapt to future needs of the Bank over time.
An exhaustive investigation of the different alternatives existing in the market was carried out, and "After analyzing, carrying out tests, consulting with several suppliers in the market and, weighing the virtues of each of the systems we evaluated, we decided on SoftGuard, a platform that we began to implement in 2011 after the bidding process", explains the Head of Control and Monitoring of the Security Management of Banco Provincia, Gustavo Depitri.
Next, the dialogue with the official of Banco Provincia, in which he details the reason for the changes, the options offered by the SoftGuard platform to the entity and what are the future actions and implementations.
- When did you start using the SoftGuard monitoring suite?
- We started in November 2011, with a trial period in some branches of Greater Buenos Aires, where the two systems coexisted – the previous platform and SoftGuard – and then, progressively, we began to migrate the monitoring of the alarm systems to the new system. With it we achieve multiple options, with control of what happens in each of the buildings and the extrabank ATMs of the Entity, allowing us to perform complex statistics, detection of technical failures, and impacting all the actions taken in our database, which ensures the traceability and scalability of them. In the security of a Bank, not only does it require a good work team, but it is essential to have reliable tools.
- What is the main difference between the old and the new system?
- The previous system was at its growth limit and was not scalable to the needs we should have to meet the high safety standards we had imposed. That is why it was concluded that centralizing the information in a single platform was very advantageous for this purpose, and that the same monitoring platform can be developed and adapted according to our measure and according to the specific requirements, which means a huge qualitative change for the security of the Bank. This greatly speeds up decision-making, and considerably increases the level of security of the Bank's locations.
- How did you decide on the current platform?
- First of all, as mentioned above, market studies were carried out and different possibilities and companies were evaluated, both domestic and imported systems. It was concluded that a national company had more versatibility for our needs, weighing the possibility of being able to adjust to the changing security needs that may arise.
- Does all the security of the Bank go through the monitoring center?
- No, the bank has different areas: while we deal with monitoring, there are other areas responsible for the installation and maintenance of security systems, as well as custody and surveillance, so converging all that information takes time and, in addition, you have to prepare the right team of people to carry out that task. In our case, with this platform we were allowed to divide the positions and the information that reaches each of them, so that we work in a balanced way. We emphasize that the current system was a fundamental pillar for the implementation of our Quality Management system under ISO 9001:2008 standards.
- What were the main contributions of the platform to the Bank's security management?
- Since its implementation, the traceability of all the actions taken by the operators before the events reported by the system has been achieved, in this way we exercise an adequate control of the operation.
With this system, plus the implementation of standardized procedures, we create safety roles and operations, which optimize and ensure the reliability of the work.
- Will they continue to grow in the implementation of different modules? What does it depend on?
- There is deep conviction of the Security Management and the Bank's Management to promote any process of constant improvement, which is why we are constantly working on the incorporation of improvements. It is not possible, today, to think about security in a watertight way but quite the opposite: it is an extremely versatile discipline that requires updating and permanent training. Today, with this SoftGuard platform, it contributes to making the monitoring of security systems in the entity simpler, more effective and reliable.
