Sponsored by Broadcom
As the financial services sector evolves to meet new realities, ongoing innovation on the mainframe continues to set the pace.
Across Latin America, CSU Digital, S.A. powers digital payments, embedded finance, and customer experiences for banks and fintechs operating on a massive scale. Its technology foundation supports more than a billion transactions and 36 million accounts — numbers that demand not just performance, but consistency, security, and trust. When systems like that work well, no one notices. When efficiency slips, the consequences compound quickly.
That’s exactly the challenge CSU Digital began to face.
When Growth Exposes Blind Spots
Transaction volumes were climbing at CSU, as expected. But as part of ongoing performance and capacity reviews, the company began to notice subtle shifts beneath the surface. Declining offloads and rising CPU costs chief among them. On paper, everything still worked. In practice, efficiency began to taper, making it tougher to sustain long-term scalability goals without deeper insight.
This moment is familiar to mainframe leaders. When utilization patterns change, it’s tempting to respond with more capacity, more spend, or incremental tuning. But those responses treat symptoms, not causes. CSU Digital took a different approach. Instead of asking, “How do we add more?” They asked, “What exactly is happening inside our workloads, and why?”
Capacity planning, performance assurance, and security compliance were already top priorities. What they lacked wasn’t data but clarity.
Choosing Insight Before Investment
To gain clarity, CSU Digital partnered with Broadcom to implement Mainframe Resource Intelligence (MRI), a no-cost solution that rapidly analyzes the mainframe environment to uncover savings, efficiency, and risk-reduction opportunities. The goal wasn’t just optimization — it was understanding.
The findings were revealing. An expired Syncsort license had quietly reduced offload efficiency, pushing more work onto general-purpose CPUs. The result was higher costs and less headroom, without any obvious operational failure. It was the kind of issue that’s easy to miss and expensive to ignore.
Fixing the license issue immediately restored efficiency. But the bigger win came from what followed. With MRI insights, CSU Digital gained a continuous, detailed view of workload patterns, CPU consumption, and resource utilization. That visibility enabled smarter tuning, more accurate capacity planning, and stronger governance across the environment.
More Throughput, Same Footprint
The outcome was striking. CSU Digital increased payment transaction throughput by 30%, without adding infrastructure or increasing spend. Improved zIIP utilization reduced operational costs, while performance headroom expanded to support future growth.
Just as important, the organization strengthened its compliance and security posture. In a highly regulated financial environment, visibility isn’t just a performance advantage, it’s a business requirement. Better insight simplified audits, reinforced controls, and protected customer experience at scale.
This wasn’t about squeezing more out of the platform one time. It was about establishing a model of continuous optimization supported by ongoing insight, expertise, and collaboration. Software alone doesn’t deliver outcomes. Insight, expertise, and collaboration do.
A Lesson for Finance Leaders
By working side-by-side with Broadcom, CSU Digital has turned optimization into a continuous practice that evolves as transaction volumes grow, regulations change, and customer expectations rise. When teams have continuous visibility into how systems behave and have trusted partners to help interpret that insight, they can grow faster without spending more.
“Success on the mainframe isn’t something we can achieve alone,” said Rogerio Aguiar, a senior IT manager at CSU Digital. “We need a partner who invests in our long-term success, not just providing great software but truly working alongside us. That’s why we work with Broadcom. They’re more than a vendor — they’re a partner.”
The mainframe is still one of the most powerful engines in digital finance. The organizations that win with it won’t be the ones who simply add capacity. They’ll be the ones who see clearly, act deliberately, and optimize relentlessly — turning insight into advantage, and partnership into scale.
Learn more about Broadcom MRI.
Libor Cerny is a Product Manager with the Broadcom Mainframe Software Division, where he is passionate about building and bringing to market products that make a difference for customers. He brings over 25 years of experience in product and operations management roles within software companies. Libor is based in Prague, Czech Republic.