Background
Société Générale is one of the leading financial services groups in Europe, with operations for retail banking, investment banking and asset management in 45 countries world-wide.
Société Générale initiated a project aimed at developing an archiving backbone for legal, regulatory and business documents, and structured records. The concept involved archiving fixed content at the end of business processes.
The compelling event was a need to comply with the European Union regulations to electronically archive retail banking account statements.. In addition, Société Générale wanted to reduce the amount of printed bank statements and provide an eDelivery solution through its customer web portal.
Solution
Société Générale needed a complete solution for their archiving requirements. Their vision encompassed acquisition, including format conversion, scanning, quality, and security; indexing and loading; storage and retention management; search and retrieval; and administration.
The key components in this solution are:
- OpenText InfoArchive was chosen as the archiving platform of choice, providing core repository services, security features and an API for web portal integration.
- CrawfordTech PRO Archiver was chosen to provide transformation and archiving services for AFP print streams integrated with the InfoArchive platform
- Dell EMC Centera was chosen as the storage platform because of its effectiveness for storing fixed content such as PDF statements.
Results
Retail users now access their statements over 60,000 times each day via secure online portals, eliminating the need to print and post statements. Over 16 million new documents are added to the archive daily and the archive, but even with over 30 billion structured and semi-structured records, using the system is straightforward and fast. Approximately 60 applications are connected to the archive, satisfying Société
Générale’s vision of a single unified system.
Benefits
Société Générale has been able to replace several existing legacy archives, reducing the total cost of ownership for these systems. The new archive uses a scalable software and hardware infrastructure that includes efficient content addressable storage, resulting in a further reduction of infrastructure costs. PRO Archiver for OpenText InfoArchive provides the key enabling technology for converting and indexing AFP print streams into PDF and PDF/A for archiving purposes. It allows the archive to use an internationally recognized format (PDF/A) for archiving and improves the ability to access and retrieve statements and content over long periods of time. PRO Archiver for InfoArchive provides 100% fidelity in transforming documents from AFP to PDF/A combined with extremely fast conversion rates.
