IBM, Crédit Mutuel Extend Partnership To Better Serve Customers

Crédit Mutuel has collaborated with IBM to devise new ways of working to better serve the bank's 12 million customers.

Crédit Mutuel has selected IBM Cloud, Watson and advanced cybersecurity technologies to fundamentally change how its customer relationships are developed and maintained.

As part of a bold strategy to embed artificial intelligence solutions in most of its banking and insurance businesses, Crédit Mutuel will now deploy IBM Watson across all of its business lines - Consumer Credit, Personal Protection, Health, Payment Instruments and Risk and Compliance.

 For its next wave of transformation, Crédit Mutuel will combine multiple technologies from IBM – IBM Cloud, Security, and Watson – to reconceive partner relationships and operations.

For example, Crédit Mutuel will now be able to reassign 200,000 working days annually towards training, upgrading advisors' skills and expanding sales activities. This follows last year's successful Watson deployment of an e-mail analyzer and virtual assistant to 20,000 advisors.

Crédit Mutuel CM11 Group chairman Nicolas Théry said: "Crédit Mutuel is deeply involved in a strategic partnership with IBM that will enable it to use technology and innovation to help people.

"Through this new joint-construction stage, Crédit Mutuel is enabled to transform its productivity gains and growth opportunities and pave the way for new services for millions of Crédit Mutuel customers and members."  

Under the extended partnership with IBM, Crédit Mutuel will be equipped to manage risk and compliance issues such as anti-money laundering and financing of terrorism, with tighter controls and monitoring with business and client identification.

In the IBM Cloud, Watson services will be secured in a fully encrypted, dedicated and isolated environment in France with back-up in Germany. In keeping with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance, Crédit Mutuel customer data is private and will never be for sale. Crédit Mutuel and IBM are fully aligned on their values around customer data protection.

Additionally, Crédit Mutuel has chosen IBM QRadar Security Intelligence to collect all major cyber security information across the world, and make it available to its security analysts. This allows Crédit Mutuel to accelerate analysis on every cyber attack attempt they face and resolve them much faster.

The bank is also using IBM MaaS360 to protect 10,000 advisors' mobile phones used across the overall Crédit Mutuel Group. Crédit Mutuel will continue to use an IBM Mainframe to ensure a robust, redundant, secure and encrypted environment for customer data and support large business process operations.

IBM Services and Crédit Mutuel are inaugurating the Cognitive Factory, bringing together AI engineers and line of business experts from Crédit Mutuel into a partnership with IBM experts.

A result of a two-year experiment conducted through a joint taskforce from both companies, the Cognitive Factory can be deployed to foster more robust innovative solutions that better meet the needs of customers, members, and advisors.

This team of 100 professionals and experts, within Euro-Information, the FinTech IT group of Crédit Mutuel, will focus on skills, training and recruitment for the bank's technical team to ensure they remain at the forefront of innovation when implementing new AI projects across the bank.

Source: Company Press Release