Bank management made easy

IBM Software Computer Services Business Analytics Bank management made easy IBM Cognos Business Intelligence offers clear views to banks Fiducia IT AG, headquartered in Karlsruhe, is the largest service provider for information technology for the German credit union Overview group FinanzGruppe Volksbanken Raiffeisenbanken and also for Business challenge private banks, and is among the top ten IT providers in Germany. To serve a client-base that includes more than 700 banks across Germany, Fiducia About 700 credit unions and more than 60 private banks use IT IT AG needed to provide management information and analytical applications solutions provided by Fiducia and trust in the high security standards of for bank executives and specialist its computing centre in Karlsruhe. In addition, public authorities and departments. companies like the Südwestrundfunk (a public broadcasting company Solution in the southwest of Germany), or the ADAC e.V. (an automobile With the IBM® Cognos® Business association), benefit from the technical expertise and the infrastructure Intelligence, Fiducia IT AG is able to of Fiducia. provide decision-making information to its customers on a consistent platform. The relevant corporate data is Currently Fiducia manages about 66 million accounts, processes automatically loaded into the Cognos more than 18 billion transactions per year, and supports about 98,000 solution and analysed to provide reports, banking desks. cause analyses and target-performance comparisons. Fiducia operates two high security data centres and offers its clients a leading banking system called ‘agree’, which is used by about 770 institutions. Fiducia IT AG and its subsidiaries employ about 3,000 people, and achieved sales of €703 million in the fiscal year 2010. Banks in competition With the ‘agree’ core banking system, Fiducia supports functional processes such as product management and account management for its customers. To stay competitive and sell services more effectively, improve customer loyalty and gain new customers, Fiducia’s banking customers also needed IT solutions to cover and integrate additional areas such as reporting, analysis and planning. Fiducia wanted to find a solution that would replace laborious manual reporting and analysis tasks with standardised processes, while still offering maximum security. Competence concentrated To meet the demands of its customers, Fiducia set up a Business Intelligence Competence Center (BICC) to concentrate on innovations in customer service, product management, application development and systems technology. The goal was to enhance the ‘agree’ core banking system with business intelligence functionality. IBM Software Computer Services Business Analytics “The executive managers of banks are already confronted with a flood of information, and in many cases they have set Business Benefits up reporting systems to handle this. However, an intuitively • Banks get the information they need to manage their businesses, plan usable information platform is still missing. They do not sales and marketing activities, offer targeted products and develop have a consolidated view of the performance figures that are successful finance concepts. most relevant for senior management, and they do not have a • Executives get a quick overview of the most important key sufficient ability to analyse the root causes of problems.” performance indicators through personalised dashboards, and can review business development based on target-performance In mid 2009, a project team at Fiducia under leadership of comparisons and react flexibly to market development and market risks. Markus Bayha worked with IBM consultants to develop a prototype: a management dashboard based on the well- proven IBM Cognos Business Intelligence platform. After “The BICC ensures that standards are defined and then the development stage, the team began the technical followed in realisation projects. This helps us increase user implementation in partnership with ten banks from across acceptance and user efficiency, and minimise our project and Fiducia’s customer-base. Over the following months, the operating costs.” project team implemented the interfaces to the different functional source systems, developed the information portal Fiducia decided to integrate IBM Cognos Business for the users, and created data cubes for causal analysis. These Intelligence into the ‘agree’ banking system, and the company cubes can be used, configured and extended individually for was keen to use Cognos solutions to form the basis of the new each bank. More than 800 key performance indicators (KPIs) business intelligence functionality. are measured, and each bank can choose to embed the most important ones in its own dashboards, and can even add new “Our developers discovered quickly that IBM Cognos KPIs themselves. The dashboard solution was launched in technology is extremely easy to use and customise,” November 2010, and is already being used by the senior remembers Markus Bayha, Product Manager for Business managers of several banks. Intelligence applications at Fiducia IT AG. “The biggest challenge in the project was to offer the banks The IBM Cognos Business Intelligence features are fully full flexibility to implement their individual management integrated into the ‘agree’ banking application, so banking models despite the standardisation of the application. The users can access them easily. The banks’ corporate data biggest part of the project work was in the area of data is stored in a central data warehouse and can be used for integration and data consolidation. Here we benefitted reporting and analysis. from the fast integration and flexibility of the IBM Cognos software.” The integrated IBM Cognos solution not only provides the scalability required to offer services to a large number Closed cycle for maximum transparency of different banks, but also ensures maximum security and Today, a comprehensive range of business intelligence usability. Moreover, the solution is seamlessly integrated with functionality is available to Fiducia customers. All 760 Fiducia’s IBM DB2® data warehouse software.