Millennium bcp is Portugal‘s biggest private-owned bank, with a prominent position in the financial market in Portugal. It is the second Bank in terms of market share and has the country‘s largest banking distribution network. While its mission statement is to create value for customers through high quality banking and financial products and services, complying with rigorous and high standards of conduct and corporate responsibility, it was a challenge for the bank to apply the highest standards also for their security management.

With a total of 872 branches and also banking operations in Poland, Greece, Mozambique, Angola, Romania and Switzerland, the task of consolidating the security operations to generate a holistic view of security situations was not an easy one. The project to establish a Millenium security room (MSR) as the center of all security operations appeared in 2007 in the context of the implementation of the European physical access control system and was a logical next step to integrate Millennium's CCTV system on their corporate network.

The MSR Project
The main objective was to establish a security management platform that integrates and adopts existing access control, fire safety, alarm and CCTV elements into one centralized system that fulfills the following needs:

• Reduce the number of false alarms for greater efficiency and effectiveness.
• Increase the efficiency and the effectiveness of the monitoring processes and physical security events response.
• Reduce operational costs.
• Promote the policy alignment, rules and procedures for physical security at group level.

Millennium Security Room was created in order to monitor security events from all branches and buildings in Portugal and to monitor the defined processes connected with alarms. From the start Millennium bcp envisioned a model with a set of security rooms that could operate in redundancy mode and would be able to manage physical security events for several of the group's financial operations. This vision took into consideration each bank's critical mass and included the assumption that major operations could monitor smaller ones.

After a thorough analysis of the existing systems and the market offering, a pilot phase, test runs and negotiations with vendors, Millennium decided to contract Nice Systems to install the Nice Situator open situation management solution as the core of their security management and response system. Nice system's partner Diebold Portugal was chosen as the system integrator for the project.

The Roll-out
From day one the project was a perfect example for how the convergence of IT systems and physical security forces projects to be handled by interdisciplinary teams. It was a critical success factor to ensure that all relevant parties were properly engaged on project's objectives and tasks. Cooperation and collaboration of the physical security division with the IT division and all other external teams - more than 10 companies were involved - was key to the design and implementation of the MSR. Another key factor was the strong working relationship with Nice systems for the duration of this project. The flexibility of the Nice Situator product combined with high level assistance in order to adapt the product to the specifics of the banking environment and the ability to deliver adjustments and upgrades on time, were crucial to the MSR project's success.
Vitor Monteiro, head of Physical Security at Millennium bcp explained, "Deployment of the Nice Situator solution allows us to fully integrate and centralize our various physical security systems. Our new control room operation was built through the integration of Nice Situator in our IT systems architecture and implementing smarter situation management solutions."

The Solution
For Millennium bcp, Nice Situator was deployed on the bank's corporate network to monitor approximately 900 branches and other buildings throughout Portugal. The solution is integrated with a wide array of bank sensors and security systems, including analog and IP CCTV cameras, access control, intrusion and fire alarm panels, fire detection systems, as well as VoIP, text messaging and email gateways. To achieve this several integration steps were necessary. First of all the bank standardized its alarm panels, then hundreds of floor plans were collected, alarm procedures were defined and designed and all workflows were implemented in the Nice Situator.

With Nice Situator, Millennium bcp addresses situations by receiving automatic alarms with information on what has occurred. The Nice solution does this by leveraging the existing Alarm Panels infrastructure and extracting additional intelligence from already available data. The solution also automatically connects a call between control room personnel and the appropriate individual at the relevant branch. It also automatically places calls to external agencies if needed, such as local city police. Furthermore, it presents step-by-step instructions to the bank's security personnel on how to handle the situation.

The system now merges data from about 50,000 sensors (including 3,000 video cameras) into a common operating picture, analyzing and correlating this information, then applying standard operating procedures and automated response plans. The sensor data, including audio, video, radio, geo-location and web, is providing a framework for fusing data silos into a single, holistic operational view. The Millenium Security Room acts as the security center and central monitoring point of the whole group where operators are monitoring more than 800 branches and 8 major buildings (5 in Lisbon and 3 in Porto), plus 11 buildings of the Tagus industrial parc surrounding the bank's headquarter. Operators from an external security company work 24/7 in the MSR in three teams of three people assigned to MSR's monitoring tasks. An alternate system and an alternate room is in place in Porto for DRP purposes. Each Workstation at the MSR is equipped with three flat screens where operators can see what is happening on the first screen, how to respond on the second and a detailed plan where it is happening on a third screen.

The Benefits
The Millennium Security Room capitalizes the use of the existing infrastructure, thus reducing operational costs and increasing efficiency of monitoring resources by the dramatic improvement in alarm information and by connecting alarms with video confirmation on the corporate network. Millenium bank is now able to evaluate all alarms: Hardware faults, communications failures, maintenance tasks and report them by region or city or branch. There are other facts that document the success of the project:
Deviations from the initial business case are less than 5% from the estimates.

• There is a strong potential to gaining efficiency in physical security hardware maintenance, since it can now be done remotely.
• The operation and administration of all systems involved are done by existing teams with no additional costs, since new system components are based on infrastructure components of the corporate Network
• Overall monitoring and response costs were reduced by 30% per year.
• The bank has established a faster and more efficient response
• Procedures forces interventions to always follow our rules, regardless who is operating the security system
• Due to its open architecture, the system enables the integration of most technologies in the present or future, thus leveraging existing investments or enabling the improvement of operations

Vitor Monteiro comments: "There are many benefits. This integration provides us with important operational cost savings. At the same time, the solution's advanced workflows and rules enables us to reduce the number of false alarms, for greater efficiency and effectiveness. Just to give you one example: With the old system we had almost 800,000 false positive alarms and almost 1,600 patrols per year were sent out because of false alarms. Now we have reduced the number of patrols sent out because of false alarms by 75%. Thanks to Nice Situator we are able to track and enforce compliance with the bank's policies and regulations, provide reports to the management and support constant improvement. We have been consistently impressed with the excellent support we receive from the Nice Systems team, and how easy it makes implementing the bank's procedures."