From 90 days to one hour

A faster, more resilient network for 10.5 million members

Serving more than 10.5 million members across Brazil, Sicredi modernized its connectivity architecture in partnership with Equinix to enhance operational resilience, accelerate its digital transformation and strengthen its integration with the country’s financial ecosystem. It reduced network provisioning time from 90 days to one hour, enabled mission-critical multicloud performance and kept core financial services running during a regional climate catastrophe.

Closing the geographic gap in Brazil’s financial hub

In a country with continental dimensions like Brazil, ensuring resilient, low-latency connectivity is a strategic challenge. For Sicredi, one of the country’s largest cooperative financial institutions, overcoming this challenge was essential to maintaining a secure, continuous and reliable financial experience.

As Sicredi’s nationwide operations grew and its digital strategy advanced, the institution saw an opportunity to evolve its connectivity architecture to provide even greater resilience, scalability and flexibility. The new approach would improve communications with strategic partners, card processors, financial institutions and the Central Bank while reducing operational complexity and the workload of infrastructure and operations teams.

In addition to improving availability, the network evolution enabled Sicredi to deliver the speed the business required. Previously, expanding capacity and integrating new partners could take up to 90 days, limiting the agility needed to support digital initiatives, new products and organizational growth.

The new approach improved the member experience and strengthened Sicredi’s ability to accelerate its digital transformation.

“At a financial institution, service stability is one of the pillars of member trust. We needed to connect millions of people to Brazil’s financial ecosystem with ever-greater levels of availability, performance and agility,” says Juliano Luz, Network Specialist at Sicredi.

Moving at software-defined speed with resilient, agile connectivity

To support its digital transformation and keep pace with growing business demands, Sicredi modernized its connectivity architecture by adopting a software-defined model. This evolution replaced complex, time-consuming processes with an agile, flexible operation that responds to demand. With the new approach, connectivity can be provisioned and adjusted in real time, reducing the time required to implement new circuits and integrations. Processes that previously required multiple interactions with vendors, support tickets and lengthy approval cycles can now be completed easily through centralized, automated management.

“What used to take months can now be completed in a matter of minutes. We gained the autonomy, flexibility and speed to connect strategic partners and adapt our network capacity as business demand changes,” says Luz.

With these operational gains, teams have moved away from reacting to incidents and now focus on technology initiatives that create value for the business. The architecture faced its true test during the historic floods in Rio Grande do Sul, when it helped Sicredi maintain services for its members.

“The combination of strategic connectivity, redundancy and automation maintained service continuity in a scenario of extreme adversity,” says Luz.

From resilience to innovation: Building Sicredi’s multicloud future

With a more resilient, flexible and software-defined connectivity architecture, Sicredi established the foundation to accelerate its multicloud strategy and support critical banking workloads with demanding performance, availability and security requirements. The result is performance close to that of on-premises infrastructure, combined with the scalability and flexibility of public clouds.

One of the main challenges involved integrating the digital ecosystems that support essential core banking applications. These systems process millions of transactions, maintain data consistency in real time and require extremely low latency to provide the best possible member experience.

The next step will be to extend network intelligence to the edge, bringing digital services closer to branches and service locations. Applications and data will travel along shorter, more efficient paths, further reducing latency and improving the member experience across Brazil. “Modernizing our infrastructure strengthened Sicredi’s ability to innovate, scale services and respond more quickly to the needs of our members and the market. With a more agile, resilient and software-defined digital architecture, we can respond faster to market demands, accelerate partner integration, support critical workloads in multicloud environments and ensure continuity of financial services even under adverse conditions. This evolution reinforces our commitment to providing increasingly resilient, efficient and available solutions to our members across Brazil,” says Marco Palma, IT Infrastructure Manager at Sicredi.

The results extend beyond technical gains. Connectivity has evolved from an operational constraint into an enabler of transformation, accelerating project implementation, reducing integration complexity and increasing Sicredi’s capacity to innovate.

“Our partnership with Equinix contributed to the evolution of Sicredi’s technology infrastructure, enhancing our ability to deliver new services with agility and security. We moved away from a rigid model dependent on lengthy implementation cycles and adopted an elastic architecture that can significantly accelerate the delivery of new financial services to communities across Brazil,” says Palma.