Financial Services digital transformation with Siebel CRM, Oracle Autonomous database and cloud native architecture in the cloud.

Grupo Aval is a Colombian holding company engaged in a wide variety of financial activities, including banking, telecommunications and real estate, in Colombia and Central America. Their vision is to consolidate ourselves as the leading financial conglomerate in the Colombian market, recognized for our solidity, profitability, sustainability, innovation and contribution in key sectors of the economy, thus maximizing value for our investors and other interest groups.

A key objective was modernizing and transforming their Client Experience (CX) themes and adopted Siebel CRM for marketing, sales and service modules.They also implemented consent management functionality in the MDM (Master Data Management) platform in order to comply with regulatory issues of client data ownership and privacy and to improve the communication of notifications and campaigns with clients.

The Siebel CRM application is providing services to approximately 15,000 employees, ensuring customer profile data is accurate and high levels of customer service. Siebel CRM has been implemented for the five largest organizations in the group. Approximately 1,000 branches are using the new system, which is totally deployed on the Oracle cloud. The system is vital as a customer experience platform for the financial group.

Oracle Siebel CRM has been implemented using Autonomous databases. All infrastructure and services are based on the OCI capabilities, so among other OCI services, Siebel CRM is deployed using OCI load balancers, ATP databases, OKE clusters, Buckets, block storages and filesystems. API connect is used from IBM in the Oracle cloud using an OKE cluster for all the online transactions and webservices from the backend systems to the cloud and vice versa. Lastly, Siebel CRM is integrated with the Azure Active Directory.

Key highlights and ROI:

• Siebel CRM has been implemented for the five largest organizations in the group. Approximately 1,000 branches are using the new system, which is totally deployed on the Oracle cloud. Customers’ data for more than 40 million people has been cleansed, transformed, and migrated to the new system. More than 450 campaigns have been launched since June 2024, and more than 4.5 million interactions have been documented on the system.
• Customer Experience - Siebel CRM has had a great impact on customer experience and the efficiency that customers are managed and the veracity and completeness of customers’ data across 15,000 users. It provides a reliable source of information to process and gather data from customers’ interactions since marketing campaigns to post services, managing complaints and doubts from customers.
• Kubernetes - Siebel CRM is deployed using a cluster of Kubernetes (OKE) with docker images and Oracle Autonomous databases. Getting on-demand capacity by using Kubernetes was one of the goals for more reliable solutions no matter what the demand of transactions or concurrency of users. In addition, deploying Oracle Autonomous databases allows us to enable, in terms of minutes, Oracle Dataguard as part of our contingency environments. Even without any deep knowledge of databases or Dataguard they were able to deploy it for the 5 database instances in just a couple of hours.
• Reduced TCO & Agility - All servers are using Oracle Linux as the operating system, and several bastions are deployed to control access to each environment. There is a Windows bastion on OCI which is used by all developers to access Siebel Tools and the development environments. Considering that this instance has all configurations already set such as Siebel Tools, SQL Developers, or other IDE solutions, giving access to a new developer or retiring access to an old developer is something achieved in minutes. This is a great capability, reducing TCO, considering that during the project there are more than 150 developers.
• User Experience - UX is based on Siebel Open UI, with 5 different themes (one for each Organization) and a framework where there are not only differences of images, fonts, CSS and JavaScript’s for each Organization but also a JSON configuration to control what fields and its location is visualized for each Organization.
• Siebel Cloud Manager - SCM was used to create new environments for updates of the Siebel CRM release. To date, they have successfully deployed all UAT environments (5 Organizations) with version 25.1 and development environments with version 24.12. The goal to migrate production environments in May 2025 to the latest Siebel CRM version. One of the key advantages of using Siebel Cloud Manager in OCI is that they can deploy or update an environment in about 2 days, something it was difficult to achieve previously.

Read more about the Grupo Aval case study.

• Grupo Aval are a recognised Solution Innovator, and an Oracle Customer Reference.