Banque Misr chooses Barco as centerpiece of its security operations center

When Banque Misr decided to centralize its nation-wide security operations, the company quickly looked at Barco to streamline it all. Three Barco video walls now form the centerpiece of the new security operations center in Cairo, allowing a team of operators to monitor some 900 remote bank sites in real time. 

Banque Misr is one of Egypt’s oldest and largest banks, offering a wide range of financial services to individuals, businesses and institutions. With a vast customer base and an extensive network of branches, Banque Misr offers its customers one of Egypt’s largest ATM networks, located across the country.

New security operations center 

In 2014, Banque Misr started planning for a security operations center, with a central command and control room in Cairo, from which all bank sites could be monitored. The new center was conceived to control various security-related systems, including a CCTV system, access control, fire alarm and intrusion detection systems. Any event picked up by these systems needed to be automatically transferred to the central control room, where an operator could be instantly alerted.

To monitor these many different systems, Banque Misr was looking for a user-friendly video wall solution that could be operated on a 24/7 basis. The video wall system needed to be able to monitor events and alerts of up to 30,000 IP cameras distributed across 900 sites all over Egypt.

Banque Misr submitted a tender and thoroughly scanned the video wall market. Intertech Vision Middle East, a leading control room specialist in the region, was ultimately able to convince the Egyptian bank with a Barco solution that offered the highest product quality, total cost of ownership, and service quality.

High-quality images over low bandwidth

The control room solution offered by Intertech now includes three Barco video walls that use the company’s LED-lit projection technology, each one in a 5 x 2 cube configuration. The 50-inch projection modules give the control room operators ultimate peace of mind, because the cubes have been designed for maintenance-free operation over several years, without needing any additional consumables. The Barco video wall also features a unique liquid cooling system, which ensures a lower temperature of the LED light sources. This results in a longer lifetime of the LED-lit video wall. 

A notable challenge was the low-bandwidth connection (only 2Mb/s) between all monitored sites and the central control room. Fortunately, Barco was able to add its advanced H.264 video encoder/decoder to the mix, a solution that supports high frame rates and full HD resolution (1920x1080). Offering the best scaling and color space conversion algorithms on the market, this image processing engine now allows the Banque Misr team to monitor all bank sites, each including more than 30 full HD CCTV cameras, over one link at a bandwidth of only 2Mb/s.

Barco also provided its TransForm N controller with CMS control room management software, enabling the operator team to configure how and where the video wall content is displayed and to collaborate in the most efficient way.

Real-time monitoring of remote bank sites 

The installation at the 900 bank sites was implemented by leading system integrator Raya Information Technology in a phased process. Installation works started in 2017 and the first phase, including the integration of 200 branches, was finalized in 2021. 2023 saw the start of phases two and three, which comprised another 342 branches. At the end of phase one, a team of 14 operators and one supervisor were monitoring the three video walls. By the end of phase two and three, the team is expected to be expanded up to 30 operators.

The construction of the central command center took ten months, including two months for the installation of the video walls. Although the Banque Misr team was worried about the alignment and the ability of the video wall to process so many inputs, Barco was able to complete the project successfully and supported the customer team all the way through.

Since its installation, the video wall system’s performance has been outstanding. Now, operators can monitor the different bank sites in real time, respond immediately to security incidents, and reduce the risk of theft or other criminal activities. The centralized monitoring has also streamlined security operations and omitted the need to be physically present at each branch. The increased security control provided by the project has already acted as a deterrent to potential criminals, leading to a decrease in crime rates.