Financial institution deploys 97

FinCom'un is a financial services business dedicated to serving low-income people in Mexico. FinCom'un employees 170 people, at its headquarters in Mexico City, and spread across its 97 branches throughout the country.

FinCom'un is widely recognised as Mexico's premier micro-finance institution and a pioneer in the use of technology, the testing of new ideas and innovative partnerships. Offering community-based financial services through personalised treatment, modern technology and low transaction costs is a big part of their mission statement. As a company with such philanthropic origins, maximising efficiency via cutting-edge technology has been a cornerstone of FinCom'un's continued success.

FinCom'un has 97 branch offices across six states of Mexico. All transactions that take place at these branch offices are computerized and linked to a central server, with the view that all client information can be accessed immediately from this database. With users at branch offices dependent on the WAN for the delivery of critical data and applications, within this centralised network environment, FinCom'un suffered bandwidth constraints that in turn began to effect branch productivity.

Adolfo Quiroz, IT Manager, explains: “It's vital that branch productivity is optimal because that's where our customers open new accounts and generate payments and loans. All customer procedures that are in the branches are directly related to the main data centre at headquarters, and we found 128kbps connections for our branch offices was simply not sufficient.”

Rather than continually purchase more bandwidth to overcome the daily challenges of its operations, which would mean a significant and ongoing investment in ISP line rental, FinCom'un turned to trusted IT partner and telecommunications specialist, SP@CNET, to look at alternative strategies to address the problems.

SP@CNET recommended WAN optimisation, specifically Expand Networks. Following this, FinCom'un tested Expand Networks' Accelerators between its headquarters and one branch. Immediately the Accelerators improved application performance and showed increases, whereby the existing link of 128kbps actually behaved as an E1.

FinCom'un also required increased visibility of the traffic flows on the network to fully understand how and why its bandwidth consumption was being used, so that the IT team could better manage the network and plan for future IT strategies. Gustavo Rodriguez, CSE at SP@CNET, explains: “It was very important for FinCom'un to discover what kind of traffic was travelling over their WAN, in order to fully understand the network issues and apply appropriate technology and policies. We quickly found that users were running programs with very high bandwidth consumption, such as “e-mule”, which was impacting the delivery of more critical applications; causing congestion and latency to further add to the bandwidth constraints.

It also became clear that the 10Mbps FinCom'un were paying for from their ISP only actually resulted in 6Mbps. All this confirmed they needed more bandwidth and more network control for their daily operations. Expand's next-generation compression and caching takes limited Wide Area Links and can create four to 10 times the throughput, on the exact same infrastructure. In our minds, the ideal solution was to install Expand Networks across all their branches. This would provide the virtual bandwidth they needed and also provide reporting tools to ensure FinCom'un knows exactly what is happening on the backbone for every site.”

Following a competitive tender, FinCom'un chose Expand Networks over competitive products from Riverbed, Blue Coat, Cisco and Juniper for the combination of superior technology, high-level technical support and cost-efficiency.

Adolfo Quiroz explains: “The Expand solution provided the best technical performance for accelerating our critical applications and SP@CNET provided a highly-professional team of engineers. On top of this, the solution offered a return on investment of just six months, meaning the technology would practically pay for itself.”

SP@CNET met challenging implementation requirements, installing Expand Accelerators in 97 branches across six states in just 24 hours. Now in place, the Accelerators are using low latency, byte-level caching techniques that work on all applications to consistently deliver average bandwidth increases 1 400% across the organisation. With this level of optimisation, accelerating applications to over 7 000%, FinCom'un has no need to upgrade or increase its Internet payment for the next five years.

FinCom'un is set to achieve considerable savings by optimising its current network infrastructure and renewing its ROI with Expand Networks' WAN optimisation technology.

These substantial savings are set to be achieved over a period of three years, factoring in significant monthly savings on FinCom'un's bandwidth rental. In addition, with the Expand Accelerators in place, employee productivity has increased dramatically and application response times have been significantly reduced.

“On top of the financial and productivity savings, e-mail is much more user-friendly and bandwidth consuming programs such as 'e-mule' are no longer a problem. In addition, Expand's Accelerators Virtual Server technology provides us with integrated Wide Area File Services (WAFS) capabilities. Through WAFS our branch offices now have the ability to exchange files faster and easier, which in turn will generate a financial return. The WAN-Out capabilities also provide us with resilience, knowing that if the WAN ever does go down, all our branch offices can continue to access files via Expand and not halt productivity.”

Expand Networks' Accelerators are bridging the WAN proximity gap between FinCom'un's branch office employees and their centralised applications and data centre services, successfully increasing user productivity, customer satisfaction and generating savings across the business. “Offering community-based financial services through personalised treatment, modern technology and low transaction costs is a big part of our mission statement,” Adolfo Quiroz explains. “Committed to retaining low operating costs alongside the highest service levels in this way, Expand has provided us with a solution that is both performance-oriented and cost-effective.”

Expand's virtual proximity experience is making a real difference to the organisation's bottom line. Through delivering virtual bandwidth, the productivity levels provided to FinCom'un are translating directly into more contracts, more flexibility in payments and services, and ultimately, satisfied customers, all contributing toward its mission to offer community financial services that will help to resolve the structural causes of poverty in the region.