Banco Falabella Perú is a division of Falabella Financiero, which is the largest issuer of credit cards in Chile and Peru. Falabella Financiero was founded in 1989 with the aim of offering credit access to department store customers, it has since evolved into a comprehensive provider that also includes banking, insurance and travel services. Banco Falabella itself was launched in Peru in 2007. The bank offers accounts, credit cards, CDT, banking insurance, credits, CMR points, care channels, business banking, and other benefits. The bank implemented COBIS OmniTeller solution to support the operation of an office with teller stations by:

• Controlling of open and close of offices and their teller stations
• Balancing of teller stations, preventative and definitive
• Discharge of checks sent to the exchange to support the cash register
• Taking the teller station over in extreme situations
• Cash requests in the office and between offices
• Sending of cash remittances controlled by the system
• Interfaces for the accounting of transactions with other cores and direct accounting
• Remote and present authorisations by supervisors, including fingerprint authorisation
• Registry of check deposits by transaction, whether they be manual or by scanning

Implementation Process

The project started in January 2020. The project comprised of 40 business features and support for development and implementation. The team was culturally diverse and worked remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. The team includes Cobiscorp Ecuador, Banco Falabella Perú, and a group of functionality testers also in Peru. The project was not affected by COVID-19. Cobiscorp managed to complete all the implementation milestones on time such as ethical hacking, stress tests, peripheral driver development, and remote installations of the application using Teams, WhatsApp, phone calls, and other tools. Peripherals were purchased online to use in the development of their drivers. The fingerprint testing team from Peru conducted certification tests. The average size of the technical and functional team throughout the project was 30-40 people. The architecture was complex, with OmniTeller integrated with several technologies such as ISO8583, ApiRest, SOAUI, Active Directory, and fingerprint verification with Reniec. There were online channels called ‘functional boards’ and ‘technical boards’ with an average of 30 people per table on the go-live day. 3 relevant issues appeared on the first day, and all were immediately resolved.

The agile methodology for the development and implementation process included Kanban boards for work and productivity control. Retrospectives and technical meetings were conducted for the resolution of doubts and challenges with the team. The Sprint Review, Sprint Demo, and System Demos were made to the client.

Some of the tools and best practices for development include:

• Automatic builds for the generation of installers.
• Automatic releases for display in environments
• Reprocessable installers to keep the installer up to date throughout the project until release to production
• Tests for security and development best practice verification Development tools for productivity, including COBIS Designer and COBIS Engine
• PCI Regulatory Compliance

Some of the Infrastructure best practices include provisioning non-productive environments in the cloud, achieving speed in deployment, secure end-to-end communication over TLS, and high availability scheme and Contingency scheme.

The project was managed from the visioning stage until the pilot with an agile development methodology. In the visioning phase, meetings were held in the three countries where Banco Falabella operates. The objective was to achieve a digital transformation that allows standardising cash management in the three countries with different regulations. The Cobiscorp team met with each country’s technical and functional stakeholders, delivering a ‘Release Board / Feature Map’ as a kickoff before beginning development. During development, the governance of the project included a Business Owner, Development and Implementation Product Manager, 2 Product Owners, 10 developers, 2 testers, and an Application and Implementation Architect.

Each phase required complying with all the necessary milestones of a project: technical and functional precertification training. This included technical and functional training for first level support and help desk, load and stress tests, security tests, development cycle with internal testing and certification, dashboard management for reporting issues, management of exchange controls, follow-up of the project with the client’s PMO, Cobiscorp budget control, and Internal architecture committees for decision-making on complex designs.

Benefits Achieved

The customer has a new Teller application, easily adaptable and integrable to its needs. It is highly configurable and with decoupled architecture so that in other countries, cores can be integrated that are inherently different due to differences in government/regulation. The client can promptly carry out its digital transformation objective as a corporate achievement (not just local developments) and recover its investment by optimising the costs of maintenance, knowledge, and support for the three countries involved in the project.

The client complies with the regulatory requirements of each country, for example, in Peru, by complying with money laundering controls, withholding, taxes, etc. in an automated way. It controls cash and ATM balancing to solve internal issues and minimise the risks of theft/fraud. The customer can continue to evolve with this application incrementally without production outputs requiring any large deployment efforts.

COBIS, with its OmniTeller solution, has been facing important challenges to achieve a version control that increases the functionality horizontally and vertically, which may or may not be used by a client, which can be turned off or configured. The solution gives Banco Falabella Perú a great advantage to be able to configure functionalities and, it is an important strategic step in the digital transformation of the bank.

Conclusion

The COBIS OmniTeller implantation project in Banco Falabella Perú changed the traditional face-to-face installation. Except for the visioning phase, this project carried out the development, implantation, start-up, and post-production phases remotely with minimal impact. The Cobiscorp team demonstrated high productivity for both the customer and suppliers and great teamwork post-production, all remotely, breaking paradigms in both the client and suppliers.

Key Facts

Bank: Banco Falabella Perú
Headquarters: Chile
Supplier: Cobiscorp
Solution: COBIS OmniTeller
Timeline: January 2020 – August 3, 2020