BBVA Brings a Real-Time Core to the U.S.

Sergio Fidalgo, chief information officer of BBVA Compass, is deploying a new core, real-time transactions across all channels and a new CRM system to support long-term customer relationships, instead of one-off product sales at the bank.

Although he's too polite to come out and say it directly, a theme that emerges when Fidalgo talks about the core banking overhaul he is overseeing is that European banks tend to take a more careful and customer-conscious approach to technology than those in the U.S. The point of this huge project, an upgrade of all foundational technology at the $62.7 billion-asset BBVA Compass, is to build long-standing customer relationships — the refined European way — rather than to innovate on and sell individual products, the American way.

BBVA, of Madrid, bought Compass, in Birmingham, Ala., in 2007. The parent company is gradually shifting the bank from being product-oriented, with one head of deposits and one head of consumer assets, to a management divided by customer segments — there's now a consumer group and a small-business segment. One level below are the product specialists. "This is a clear sign of trying to move the organization from, instead of bringing the product to people, figuring out what customers need, and then from that answer, working on delivering products," Fidalgo says.

To make the bank's technology infrastructure match its customer relationship vision, BBVA is migrating the bank to a new core system, Accenture's Alnova, and deploying a new customer relationship management system created by BBVA Group. "We're breaking the silos we have, not only the product silos but also the line of business silos," Fidalgo says. Before, each division had its own CRM database; the new CRM system being imported from the central BBVA group will be a single storehouse for customer data for retail banking, wealth management and commercial banking. "This will ease a lot of the dialogue between lines of business," he says. The CRM software is up and running for retail and wealth management. The bank is still modifying the commercial portion, which is expected to be ready in the second quarter of 2012.

"We're working to provide employees with that full view of the customer portfolio," Fidalgo says. "We'll be working in the future on referral systems between these lines of business."

The Alnova system has one central customer information file that will store basic information from customers (even commercial customers), such as name, address, Social Security number and phone in one place, which Fidalgo refers to as a "golden file."

The conversion from a fragmented architecture to a single CIF was somewhat challenging, Fidalgo notes. "You have to clean the data, and you have to make sure you're populating the database with the right data that you might have had in six different places," he observes. "But we're already working actively on that conversion. The cleaning of the data is being done as we speak."

The customer data is replicated between current and new systems, so that all will be ready when the bank goes live with deposits on the new system. This will be rolled out state by state. "This is something we're planning very carefully," Fidalgo says.

A Phased Approach
The bank has broken down the project into three releases. First is an infrastructure/architecture release. "It's not a business release, it's not something we put in branches, it's something we have yet to give to our operations people, but it's a foundation for the rest of the modules that are going to be sitting on top of it," Fidalgo explains. The architecture and the customer information file went live at the end of May. "That was a big step. It doesn't really impact the business, but it's absolutely critical to be able to put the rest of the modules in place."