Provident tackles financial inclusion with confidence thanks to data resilience from Veeam

Since its inception in 2003, Provident has blazed a trail through Mexico, offering credit to under- served parts of the population. The company continues to innovate, using technology to supplement its offering and make inroads into new markets.

“Our services represent a lifeline to the unbanked, often giving them first-time access to credit,” said Nestor Rodriguez, Director of Innovation, Technology and Business Development at Provident. “We recently developed an app in just three months that gives customers real-time insight into loan repayments and will soon include loan applications and approvals. Next, we’ll launch the app in Poland, Hungary, Czechia, and Romania.”

Underpinning these innovations is Provident’s technology infrastructure, which delivers non-stop access to data to drive credit decisions on new loans and credit increases for existing loans.

“If we lost data, we could make the wrong decision, miss out on revenues, or even attract fines from the regulators. Our previous approach of native backups only was no longer cutting it, especially with the growing incidence of cyberattacks,” said Rodriguez.

Provident selected Veeam to prevent interruptions to its operations, helping it to deliver its innovative financial services around the clock. The company narrowed down its choices to three vendors before making its decision.

Provident backs up approximately 300 TB of data using Veeam, representing 100% of its critical IT environment and almost 70% of non- priority systems, all running on VMware hosted in the Amazon WebServices (AWS) cloud. Veeam protects the company’s core banking application, plus its Microsoft 365 landscape. Provident stores its backups in Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier buckets.

“For our Microsoft 365 environment, we started by backing up Outlook and we will soon add OneDrive too. The best thing about Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 is that we can now offer users access to their email history without relying on PST files. That makes them much easier to search and share and less vulnerable to corruption,” said Rodriguez.

Each week, Provident reconciles its core banking systems — an essential process that used to take between 36 and 48 hours. By deploying Veeam, the company has accelerated this process considerably.

“With Veeam, our core banking reconciliation times have dropped to as little as six hours, an improvement of as much as 87%,” said Rodriguez. “The advantages of this include having up-to-date information on our position available sooner to drive business decision-making. We also avoid the reconciliation process over-running and affecting production systems.”

By enabling Provident to recover data faster and more reliably, Veeam is helping the company boost its contingency plans. The company is now better prepared for incidents ranging from a minor hardware failure to a major cyberattack.

“Last year, we did a disaster recovery test and found that we could recover almost 90% of our critical services with Veeam in less than six hours, which is a massive improvement over before,” said Rodriguez. “We estimate that we could completely bounce back from a large-scale incident, such as a cyberattack, with Veeam in less than 12 hours. That allows us to minimize disruption to our customers.”

As Provident pursues its digital transformation plans, Veeam is keeping management overheads low. The company has increased resilience without adding headcount, helping it to safeguard profitability in a competitive market.

“As our business is rapidly growing, so is our data,” said Rodriguez. “Veeam never fails to scale and adapt alongside our changing IT environment and technology requirements, supporting Provident as we continue to transform. It puts information about data protection at our fingertips so we can meet our compliance obligations with ease and concentrate on our next move.”

• 87% reduction in weekly reconciliation time for core banking system 
  Provident can now complete the reconciliation in as little as six hours rather than two days, delivering an up-to-date view of the business sooner and preventing impact on production systems.
• Slashed recovery time from a large-scale disaster to less than 12 hours 
  Using built-in cyber-resilience features and granular restore functionality within Veeam, Provident is better prepared for a wide range of incidents.
• Supported digital transformation efforts without increasing headcount 
  “Veeam never fails to scale and adapt alongside our changing IT environment and technology requirements, supporting Provident as we continue to transform,” said Rodriguez. “It puts information about data protection at our fingertips so we can meet our compliance obligations with ease and concentrate on our next move.”