Finds relevant information faster
With Elastic, customers and employees can find relevant answers to their queries quickly.
Delivers stable performance
Elastic delivers reliable, fast performance to support core applications while simplifying setup, maintenance, and upgrades.
Drives productivity with generative AI
With Elastic, generative AI applications improve employee productivity, freeing up more time to focus on customer service.
Leading Belgian bank provides fast, reliable customer service and support with Elasticsearch
Nearly one-third of Belgians, half of all companies, 90% of hospitals, and 100% of municipalities in Belgium have one thing in common: They're happy customers of this major financial services organization. The state-owned bank attributes much of its success to its strong commitments to customers and community. Its profits support nearly €11 billion in loans that stimulate the Belgian economy, from helping entrepreneurs launch small businesses and families settle into new homes, to constructing new schools, hospitals, and theaters that form the backbones of neighborhoods.
The bank puts customer satisfaction at the center of its long-term strategy for growth. Continuous innovation, supported by technology, plays a major role in this strategy by providing its diverse customers — from individuals and business owners to public institutions and investors — with the services that they expect from a modern, leading bank.
When developing its mobile investment platform, the goal was to make investing more accessible to everyone. Customers would need a way to find stocks and funds, either by name or by theme, such as healthcare, renewable energy, or AI. The company deployed Elasticsearch to provide seamless search, first within the investment platform, and eventually for use by customers and employees.
"Elasticsearch gives us high-performance search capabilities that put more relevant data into the hands of end users much faster," says the lead engineer at the Belgian bank.
The right information served up quickly
The lead engineer first discovered Elasticsearch from IT teams using Elastic Observability. After evaluating several search options, Elastic was the clear leader. With Elastic already delivering superior search capabilities in the investment platform, customers have access to a self-service platform where they can find stocks and funds across multiple stock exchanges. This serves as a new stream of revenue while attracting customers who prefer taking control of their investments.
"A simple keyword search isn’t good enough anymore. Using Elastic’s vector search on Azure, we can get users the relevant, contextual search results they need, which saves huge amounts of time."
The bank also uses Elastic’s vector database to bring together a wide variety of internal documentation and customer data updated in near real time for use across many different systems, including digital signature systems. Having all data within a single platform creates opportunities to reuse data and deliver added value for customers. When customers walk into a local banking branch or call the customer contact center to make changes to their account, agents can search for their name and pull up all of the information that they need to serve customers quickly and even anticipate customer concerns.
Working with Elastic, users not only find the exact information that they need, but they get results much faster, saving a great deal of time. Rather than producing a 100-page document, for example, the search can direct users to specific paragraphs containing the information that they're looking for. "A simple keyword search isn't good enough anymore. Using Elastic for vector search, we can get users the relevant, contextual search results they need," says the lead engineer.
Stable performance at all times
Elastic forms the backbone for so many services — from customer support capabilities to revenue streams such as the investment platform — as the bank can't afford downtime. The lead engineer praises Elastic for its stability in maintaining excellent performance and availability, saying, "Elasticsearch is very simple to set up, maintain, and upgrade. We’ve never had any problems. It's very stable and simply works."
"I've worked with many systems over the years, but Elastic surprised me with just how good it is. We can rely on Elastic to deliver so many of our core capabilities."
Looking to the future with GenAI
The bank recently began expanding its use of Elastic to support generative AI (GenAI). "One of the biggest benefits of Elastic is how fast you can build an ecosystem on it. We were already using Elasticsearch as our default vector database, so it made sense to use it for retrieval augmented generation (RAG) in our GenAI applications. We've been impressed with the results," says the lead engineer at the major retail bank.
Employees across the company can use GenAI to summarize documents, translate text, and even rewrite code. "The stability and performance of Elastic made it the right choice to help scale the GenAI framework and encourage adoption for more use cases across the company," says the lead engineer.
To support increased Elastic use, the bank plans to move to Elastic Cloud on Microsoft Azure, further improving availability and scale with seamless upgrades and zero downtime. Security is critical at this major bank, and the lead engineer is confident that the bank can comply with any regulations using Elastic Cloud.
He states that to prioritize customers, they must invest in its digital transformation. The integration of Elastic enhances the value and speed of its services, enabling it to become Belgium's leading trusted bank — a significant advantage in a competitive market.
