Crédit Agricole

Key figures

• 20 million customers in France
• 59 million customers worldwide
• Present in 70 countries
• 11500 Agencies worldwide

The context

Crédit Agricole’s Regional Banks rank first in almost all local markets in France. With 20 million customers, Crédit Agricole’s Regional Banks account for around 24% of the retail market. The Regional Banks market Crédit Agricole’s full range of banking and financial products and services, including deposit-taking, investment in equities, bonds, mutual funds and life insurance, the distribution of home and consumer loans to businesses and professionals, payment instruments and non-life insurance products.

These services can be accessed via a network of 7,025 local branches, backed up by more than 7,500 ‘green points’ set up in retail outlets, as well as via remote banking services (interactive voice server, internet, mobile phone). These figures demonstrate Crédit Agricole’s strong local roots and close relationship with its customers.

The need

“Our 39 regional branches, local agencies and ‘green points’ make up an extremely vast network and therefore complex to manage. In terms of Internet flows, CA Silca is the single, highly resilient point of entry for all these structures. We have a duty to offer a high level of performance commensurate with this challenge” explains Frédéric Orsoni, Head of Network Security and Messaging at Crédit Agricole Silca.

In 2003, Crédit Agricole launched a search for an acceleration solution to boost the performance of its online banking and insurance services. UBIKA, a major player in web application security since 2001, with its solutions renowned for their robustness and reliability was among the various solutions selected.

The solution

UBIKA WAAP Gateway: for a tenfold increase in Internet network performance.

Crédit Agricole carried out comparative tests to put the shortlisted solutions through their paces, and “UBIKA’s WAAP Gateway stood out from the crowd. In fact, the solution met our needs in terms of caching, acceleration and application filtering while delivering very good performance. It was also the only one to offer such comprehensive log management, and on this point UBIKA WAAP Gateway still stands out,” says Frédéric Orsoni. He added: “UBIKA WAAP Gateway was quickly integrated into our infrastructure, with minimal configuration required. On a day-to-day basis, we appreciate the openness of this solution, which has enabled us to industrialise the production of this security brick to ensure the protection and acceleration of some 700 Internet, banking or institutional sites.”

The Black List, a pro-active security feature that’s simple to implement…

The complexity of cyber attacks is forcing Crédit Agricole to ensure that the solutions implemented have an optimum level of security while maintaining the performance of its network.
“Today web applications are increasingly under attack, but they also have to evolve rapidly; in this context we need to be sure that the level of protection is the most relevant. We’ve made sure of that with the Black List,” explains Frédéric Orsoni.
“The Black List is developed by the R&D department, and is regularly updated. This means that our teams monitor developments in attacks on a daily basis to anticipate countermeasures and, more often than not, be the first to propose solutions to block these attacks”

UBIKA solutions, a sustainable choice…

Over the years, the choice of UBIKA solutions has been extended to other entities managed by CA Silca, such as LCL, which uses WAAP Gateway, To protect its online banking site. Today, around 700 Crédit Agricole Group applications are protected by UBIKA’s WAAP Gateway.

The expert’s opinion

Security is a key element in our infrastructure today and that’s what we find in UBIKA’s solutions with the day-to-day performance we seek for our customers

Frédéric ORSONI
Network Security and Messaging Manager
CA Silca