BNP Paribas has picked Orange Business Services (OBS), a part of telecom company Orange, as its technology partner to accelerate its digital transformation in France.

The retail lender will deploy Orange’s SD-WAN solution at over 1800 bank branches in the country.

The solution – designed by OBS and BNP Paribas experts – will deploy over 3,600 access lines (two per branch), including one internet access line.

The lender will keep the business running at each site during this migration process.

The SD-WAN solution will provide the bank with a “modern and agile” technological platform to help boost digitisation and enhance customers’ and employees’ experience.

The bank will be able to deploy multiple services like dynamic routing and path selection.

The solution will also enable administrators to monitor infrastructure performance and network traffic, ultimately boosting application performance.

BNP Paribas will be empowered with a multi-cloud, multi-access and multi-application hybrid network.

It will also benefit from centralised management and intelligent routing capabilities.

Apart from the SD-WAN overlay, the deployment also includes firewalls for improved security.

Orange Business Services EVP of French major clients Nadine Foulon-Belkacémi said: “We are delighted to support BNP Paribas in their transformation program and deploy the first large-scale SD-WAN project in the retail banking industry for the French market.”

BNP Paribas CIO Bernard Gavgani said: “In addition to their IT expertise, the Orange teams demonstrated a great ability to understand our business challenges, and they knew what needed to be done to support our end-to-end digital transformation.

“This close collaboration between our teams from the very beginning of the project was one of the keys to its success and to a smooth rollout.”