Building the Bank of the Future with Webex Teams

Building Tomorrow with Webex Teams Today

Providing secure applications in a financial setting is an absolute must! Creating enterprise-grade team collaboration applications that deliver consumer-like features and experiences is much harder to do, but critical for users who are already using these features in their daily lives. But with Webex Teams, users can enjoy these consumer experiences delivered in a secure setting. Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) is one of our partners that have been able to seamless merge security and customer-like experiences by choosing Webex Teams to solve their unique collaboration challenges.

Founded in 1857, BBVA is a global financial services giant headquartered in Madrid, Spain. The banking group has a strong leadership position in the Spanish market, the largest financial institution in Mexico, and has strong franchises in South America and the Sunbelt region of the United States; it is also the leading shareholder in Turkey’s Garanti BBVA. BBVA leads the way in worldwide digital banking after they underwent a digital transformation. Today, over half of their worldwide sales and customer interactions are made through digital channels. Their mobile app is repeatedly ranked as the #1 app by Forrester Research. This digitization project also sought to ensure that BBVA’s employees were able to enjoy a rich collaborative workplace experience by upgrading their communication touchpoints.

With more than 125,000 employees working in thousands of offices across 30 different countries, BBVA sought a solution that would address their users’ collaborations needs whilst also maintaining the highest level of security. With this goal, the organization embarked on a workplace transformation initiative to ensure all their employees enjoyed a secure and seamless collaboration experience.

The Problem

BBVA was concerned that its workforce would adopt consumer and non-IT approved collaboration tools to solve their individual and team collaboration needs. These applications, which would not have met the appropriate security requirements for a financial environment, would have posed security risks. Comparing the options, BBVA endorsed Cisco Webex as an exceptional solution that would meet the requirements for ease of use, security, and integration with data loss prevention strategies (CASB Cloudlock), while still offering their users a first in class collaboration service. While security was always top of mind for BBVA, they were also keen to ensure their users enjoyed a great messaging experience, team collaboration experience. Features such as Emojis, Reactions, and GIFs in Webex Teams have been enthusiastically received.

A Small Trial Leads to a Big Success

The BBVA trials started with Webex Teams in 2019 with a focused group of 50 individuals in the IT department. This group consisted of an even split of deployment engineers in the Madrid headquarters, and 25 individuals seated in other geographic regions around the world. Webex Teams, as it delivered a secure platform, also enabled users in this trial to start working from home more frequently and still enjoy an immersive collaboration solution.

The success of this initial small trial resulted in a further expansion of Webex Teams to over 1000 employees, spread across multiple regions and to a wider section of the organization. Feedback from their users was exceptionally positive and senior leadership within BBVA quickly made the decision to fully adopt Webex as their collaboration platform of choice. In fact, they will be rolling Webex Teams out to their entire workforce in early 2020.

Webex Teams – Critical to Deliver Seamless, Secure Collaboration

The adoption of Webex Teams will allow users within BBVA to have a home base in the app where they can safely share and edit documents, easily schedule meetings, and keep in touch with their colleagues thru simplified calling and chat capabilities. With integrations like Google Calendar and more, Webex Teams’ users can access the collaboration tools they need and enjoy the same messaging experience they would in the consumer world, with GIFs, reactions and emojis.

What’s Next?

BBVA is also capitalizing on Webex room video devices to create a seamless user collaboration experience across all their office locations and spaces. Some of these spaces now have the Webex Board for cordless pairing and sharing, video conferencing, and ideation with anyone across any boundary. BBVA teams can now store everything they create on the Webex Board in the cloud and associate it with a virtual room. Then team members can use the Webex Teams to pick up where they left off in the physical room and continue working anywhere.

Combining Webex room devices with Webex software for seamless user experience, along with obtaining security standards BBVA demands, Cisco Webex has now become central to the communications needs of this financial giant. Optimizing their collaboration technology is helping BBVA transform how their teams get work done in order to meet the ever-changing needs of their global customer base.