CEC Bank is Romania's oldest financial institution, with roots dating back to 1864 and history that spans world wars, political transformations, and decades of economic change. Today it stands as the country's third-largest bank by assets, with over 2 million clients served through the largest branch network in Romania: more than 1,000 locations, the majority serving communities across the country.
As a state-owned institution, CEC Bank carries a mission that extends beyond commercial banking. It plays a central role in financing agriculture, SMEs, and public administration, making its operational effectiveness a matter of national economic importance.
In 2020, the bank launched a strategic transformation program, with two core pillars: growing the business and modernizing the bank. At the heart of that modernization was a fundamental shift in philosophy: from a product-centric model to a genuinely customer-centric organization supported by Creatio platform.
Key Deliverables
Unified 360° Customer View
Consolidated fragmented customer data from multiple systems into a single, real-time profile accessible to every client-facing employee.
End-to-End CRM Platform
Deployed Creatio across sales, service, and marketing modules — covering leads, opportunities, cases, and complaints management.
Front-to-Back Office Transparency
Connected front office relationship managers with back-office teams through visible, trackable workflows and shared process ownership.
Complaints & Case Management
Built a guided, structured module for recording and resolving customer complaints — simplifying what was previously a fragmented, manual process.
First Cloud CRM in Romanian Banking
Pioneered the first cloud-based CRM implementation in Romania's banking sector, setting a new standard for digital transformation in the industry.
Enterprise-Grade Adoption Program
Launched 'Smart Revolution' — a multi-quarter change management initiative training 3,750 client-facing staff across 1,000+ branches.
Serving 2 Million Clients Across 1,000 Branches
For a bank with CEC's scale and heritage, the operational complexity was significant. Relationship managers and tellers across the branch network were navigating multiple disconnected systems to serve a single customer while piecing together information that was fragmented, inconsistent, and time-consuming to access.
Without a unified view of the customer, decisions were made on intuition and individual expertise rather than structured data. Leads, opportunities, and cases were tracked manually. The front office and back office operated with limited visibility into each other's work, slowing response times and creating blind spots in the customer journey.
At the same time, customer expectations were evolving rapidly. As one senior executive noted, the competitive landscape had shifted: banks were no longer differentiated purely by reputation or product range. The battlefield had become customer care — and that required a fundamentally different operating model.
Twenty years ago, banking was somehow perceived as being arrogant — banks invested in reputation and waited for customers to come. Now most banks have comparable products, comparable services, comparable reputation. The battlefield is customer care.
Agentic CRM for Customer-Centric Banking
When CEC Bank began a rigorous evaluation of CRM platforms, benchmarking solutions listed on Gartner and Forrester against two non-negotiable criteria: the ability to become a long-term strategic partner, and a demonstrated understanding of the market's specific requirements.
Creatio was selected. The decision was about finding a partner capable of supporting a 160-year-old institution through its next era — one with the flexibility, AI-native architecture, and local market knowledge to evolve alongside the bank.
The implementation, known internally as 'Smart Revolution,' was designed from the start as a full organizational transformation. The initiative structured around three sequential releases, moving from foundational data infrastructure to operational CRM modules and ultimately to analytical and agentic capabilities.
Implementation scope:
A defining feature of the implementation was the parallel rollout of CBS (core banking solution) and CRM, with Creatio serving as the master data layer for customer data, feeding information in real time to the core banking system via modern event-streaming architecture. This approach created an integrated data foundation that had not previously existed at the bank.
CRM is a guide — a co-pilot that accompanies us from prospecting all the way to putting a product on the balance sheet. It is a multi-chapter story, because we started from rapid access to customer data and arrived at efficient end-to-end flows for all customer segments and all product types.
Building a Culture of Adoption at Scale
Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of CEC Bank's approach was its treatment of adoption as the primary success metric
From the moment the project was awarded, the bank's leadership made adoption of Creatio the organization's top priority — ahead of implementation milestones. Two parallel workstreams ran throughout the program: the technical implementation and a structured change management plan, led by certified change managers within the bank.
My number one priority, number two priority, and number three priority was adoption, adoption, adoption. We could have a successful implementation but a failed project. That's why from the start, the project had two lanes — not just implementation, but preparing the change.
For a full year before go-live, CEC Bank's leadership engaged branch managers and regional teams across a quarter of the network, explaining not just what the new platform would do but also why it represented a fundamentally different way of working, one that put the customer at the center of every interaction.
The View From the Branch: What Changed on Day One
With Creatio live across the first cohort of branches, early feedback from relationship managers and tellers has been consistent across two themes:
A Complete View of the Customer
Creatio consolidates this into a single, real-time Customer 360 view, giving every employee immediate access to a complete, accurate picture of the customer in front of them. For relationship managers handling complex portfolios and for tellers managing high transaction volumes, this is an immediate and tangible improvement in their daily work.
Transparency Between Front Office and Back Office
The second major early impact is operational: for the first time, front office teams can see exactly where a customer request sits in the process — who owns it, what stage it has reached, and who to contact to accelerate it. Back office teams have equal visibility into what is being requested and why.
This transparency reduces duplicated effort, eliminates the friction of manual coordination, and gives both front and back office employees greater confidence in how they serve customers.
When the Foundation Is Ready, AI Can Do Its Job
The current go-live represents the first phase of a multi-stage roadmap. The bank's next releases will expand analytical capabilities, activate the marketing module, and introduce AI-powered use cases designed to shift the bank from reactive to proactive customer management.
CEC Bank's AI strategy is deliberate and outcome-focused, structured around two distinct categories of value: operational efficiency through automation of repetitive processes, and business growth through AI-assisted customer management — enabling relationship managers to make personalized, data-driven decisions at scale.
What we see clearly in the market is two types of AI impact. First, operational efficiency — automating repetitive processes. Second, and harder to implement, is using AI in the client management environment as a real tool for the relationship manager — helping them go deep on customer needs and push truly personalized interactions. The operational impact is there, but it is not enough. We need to step up to where AI supports real business growth.
For CEC Bank's marketing team, Creatio represents the foundation for insight-driven, personalized engagement — something previously impossible without a unified data layer.
Every marketer's dream is to have customer insights. Without insights, you cannot make good strategy. What I can't wait for is the ability to understand customer behavior — by location, by loyalty — so we can move from reactive to proactive, and deliver personalized offers and campaigns that actually resonate.
The vision is clear: a bank that can anticipate what its customers need before they ask, that serves them with precision and speed, and that does so at the scale of over 2 million client relationships. Creatio is the foundation that makes it possible.
