NCG Banco, one of three state-administered banks in Spain, is loudly and proudly demonstrating a firm commitment to BlackBerry, even as the beleaguered smartphone firm has seen the departure of three more C-level staff in the past week.
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Fernando Quintela, mobile solutions manager at NCG Banco, told Computing that the bank will "continue supporting BlackBerry as a corporate solution", after replacing its entire mobile real estate of older BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Server) and BlackBerry devices with BES 10 and its accompanying new handsets. This includes over 1,650 BlackBerry 10 devices across a bank network spanning 680 branches nationwide.
"For NCG Banco, mobility is a strategic investment," said Quintela.
"Within our sales and operational forces a new paradigm called BYOD has emerged. We saw a strong demand from our employees to open the selection process and find a solution to manage this new trend in our organisation."
Quintela described the tendering process as "hard and competitive", with Afaria and Mobile Iron at one point in the running for security infrastructure.
"Our strategic aim was to provide the maximum user experience for our employees, and we judge our solutions against four main pillars: reliability, speed, usability and security. This would enable us to provide all of the user experience benefits of a personal device but in a business environment and at the same time provide maximum security. This was one of the key factors behind our decision to select the BlackBerry platform," said Quintela.
"We have also deployed a new financial application for the BlackBerry 10 internally," said Quintela.
"What we call ‘smart office mobility', which can be accessed by clients from any BB10 terminal anytime, anywhere."
Quintela praised BES 10's abilities as a BYOD solution: "It covers the most commonly used features of MDM in iOS, but with more security and reliability in service provision. Further distinguishing features of BlackBerry 10 are its ability to integrate perfectly with the legacy platform, and offer management capabilities far beyond other market solutions that lacked the same level integration with the installed legacy platform."
