Banca Comerciala Romana (BCR) Selects Cisco Integrated Services Router to Support Branch Transformation Process; BCR Prepares Infrastructure for Long Term Competitive Advantage

The bank is working to deploy dual network links for each branchto help provide a redundant solution, which will contribute to riskmitigation and will help towards compliance of industry regulations.With the new solution, BCR will take advantage of existing networklinks alongside the new Cisco Integrated Services Routers to buildfurther resilience into its wide area network (WAN) connections toindividual branches.

BCR, soon to be privatized by the Romanian state, needed to linkits branch offices back to its main data centre infrastructure in areliable and secure way, and determined that the Cisco IntegratedServices Router would help to reduce ongoing operational costs bycombining network security and data functions in one branch platform.By the end of 2005, the bank aims to connect most of its localbranches throughout Romania with increased network security.

"As we build our long term future, we recognized the need for anintelligent infrastructure that can evolve to support further networkbased services such as application acceleration as well as provide aplatform for continued network convergence," commented Petre Preda,executive vice president, BCR. "An immediate requirement was to builda branch infrastructure which will help us to provide customer-facingemployees in our branches with responsive and secure access to centraldatabase and applications delivered over our wide area network," addedMr. Preda.

By enhancing response times to customer applications the banksaims to streamline the customer experience in local branches, andspeed up the decision-making process for enquiries such as loanprocessing, which require access to customer relationship managementapplications running in the central data centre. The bank is alsoaiming to take advantage of the highly secure network foundation tooverlay additional services on the network such as video conferencingand e-learning.

"The Cisco vision of the Intelligent Information Network matchesBCR's foresight in viewing the network as a strategic asset forbusiness transformation," commented Kaan Terzioglu, managing directorfor Central and Eastern Europe, Cisco Systems. "Using a highly securenetwork foundation as the basis of transformation in branches can helpbanks throughout the region to position effectively for competitionand collaboration with major European players as the process ofEuropean integration continues. Cisco technologies such as theIntegrated Services Routers which provide wire speed performance formultiple concurrent services can help provide the foundation forsupporting this evolution."

The leading Romanian bank has been working closely with CiscoPartner, Omnilogic, in Romania to provide both the infrastructure andconsulting to roll the project out on a nationwide basis. The bank isdeploying the Cisco 2800/3800 Integrated Services Routers into branchoffices with integrated security options, to complement its existingCisco access router and PIX firewall infrastructure in branchestogether with Cisco IDS 4210. Cisco 7500 and 7200 series routers atcentral sites will aggregate the new branch office routerinfrastructure over the wide area network. Cisco Catalyst 6500 seriesand Cisco Catalyst 3750 series switches support its headquarter LANinfrastructure.

About Banca Comerciala Romana (BCR)

With more than 8 billion Euro in assets, BCR is the largest bankin Romania owning almost a third of the banking market. BCR currentlyhas 350 branches and agencies countrywide, covering most cities withmore than 10,000 inhabitants. BCR offers Internet banking ande-commerce services, issues 15 types of credit and debit cards and hasthe largest installed ATM network (almost 1,000 machines). The numberof BCR's clients has grown constantly, currently reaching over 5million, out of whom 90% are individuals.

With activities in the country and abroad, the BCR financial groupis also present with specialized companies on the stock, leasing andinsurance markets and in the field of asset management.

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