How BNP Paribas Bank Saved $778,000 Thanks to Code-Less MFA Implementation

BNP Paribas is the European Union’s leading bank and a key player in international banking. It operates in 68 countries and has more than 190,000 employees, including nearly 145,000 in Europe. BNP Paribas has +200 years of history in banking with mergers and acquisitions playing an important role in the company’s strategy. Up till 2022, BNP Paribas has made 10 acquisitions and 182 investments spending over $ 1.99B on the acquisitions.

Challenge

The pandemic brought new cybersecurity challenges to the BNP Paribas group. The organization wanted to create a high level of cybersecurity for all users and all devices across the entire organization and regardless of the localization.

One of the most important elements to achieving this goal was introducing Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) globally. MFA is named by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as one of the crucial ways to secure critical systems within the organization. While being one of the best ways to protect from cyberattacks, MFA is, at the same time, really hard to implement since, in a traditional approach, each application needs to be redesigned one by one.

BNP Paribas group is an organization built from numerous mergers. The bank owns +160 critical systems, many of which are legacy systems and +70 with direct internet access. The bank was looking for a new way to introduce MFA globally, without touching protected applications code, and with an option to leverage MFA methods that were already in use.