Banco BV's Transformation: Cost Savings and Efficient Cloud Management with FinOps Framework

Banco BV is one of Brazil's largest private banks, with a history of 30 years in the market. The bank offers a range of services including corporate banking, investment services, asset management, private banking, and financing. It also invests in startup and fintech development and provides credit and other products to help customers achieve their goals. The organization is known for its constant pursuit of transformations and solutions to drive technological innovation more effectively. A significant part of this journey was migrating its infrastructure to Google Cloud to ensure more flexibility and improved asset allocation.

Banco BV, one of Brazil's largest private banks, was seeking to drive technological innovation more effectively. A significant part of this journey was migrating its infrastructure to Google Cloud from another cloud provider for more flexibility and improved asset allocation. The bank's long-term goals with Google Cloud included using data intelligence to transform customer experience, increasing the potential of open platforms, creating new digital products, and refining the company's data science models. However, the bank faced the challenge of building a team to implement a FinOps culture, which involves adopting financial management best practices for its technology infrastructure. This was crucial as Banco BV was increasing its investment in digital and strategic evolution and needed enhanced cost visibility to create cost optimization and reallocation processes.

To implement the FinOps model, Banco BV utilized Google Cloud's solutions and experts. The bank used Looker Studio to increase financial accountability among teams by sharing various cloud consumption approaches. This tool was crucial in providing consumption data and opportunities to improve the cloud environment during the FinOps framework structuring journey. Banco BV also used BigQuery to extract data in various operations, such as the chargeback process, providing a specific overview of how Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is used. The FinOps department and its activities were organized under the Scrum model, an agile project management and planning method. This allowed employees with varying skills to converse and exchange experiences, predict expenses, and increase decision-making power. The democratization of cloud cost data and collaboration marked a significant moment in the process.

• The implementation of the FinOps culture at Banco BV led to several positive outcomes. The bank experienced increased market competitiveness, quick delivery, flexibility, and speed, enabled by the new environment. This led to faster value generation for end customers. The bank also achieved scalability and cost optimization, as it only paid for the cloud assets it used. The Google Cloud-based operational framework provided essential elements to increase efficiency across several activities. These included the Recommender service and GKE features to resize excess or idle assets, and the use of Cloud Scheduler to program the turndown of instances in testing environments when they are not used. One of the most significant changes was the introduction of regular result presentations for team members through Fórum FinOps.

• 30% cost savings in the institution’s monthly billing due to asset reserve management and pricing models optimization

• Improved cloud cost financial visibility using management dashboards

• Scalability and more financially efficient operations