Delivering BI to the desktop

FST catches up with Beth Smits, Senior Product Manager of the SWIFTWatch portfolio at SWIFT, to talk about the benefits of better business intelligence in the financial services sector.

FST. Could you first explain how the financial services industry benefits from business intelligence (BI)?
BS. The financial services industry is really no different from any other industry when it comes to benefiting from business intelligence. Just like if they were in any other service or manufacturing industry, financial institutions get hard facts about their business from BI – facts that either prove they’re on track or that they have a problem.

Certainly we can point to examples of how traffic flow or message cost data, which SWIFT provides with our SWIFTWatch portfolio, can help improve correspondent relationships, identify new markets, monitor sales performance and reveal operational anomalies. What’s especially interesting to note is that people in functions across the financial institution – from the front office to the back – can all find something in this data that will help them manage their part of the business better.

FST. Why do you think that some banks fail to make full use of BI? What are the common obstacles that prevent its adoption?
MS. You certainly can point to the fact that data doesn’t always flow easily from the source to the person who can benefit from it. Take the example of a correspondent network manager – they don’t necessarily know where to go to gather data about what each of their branches are doing. They know this information is useful for them to evaluate their relationships, but how do they get their hands on it? Do they go to each individual branch and ask for a report? Do they ask their IT colleagues to pull out raw data? How do they compare data from one source to data from another source? Maybe the BI is there, but it’s not always easy to find – or to access or interpret.

Perhaps the most fundamental obstacle to really taking advantage of what BI has to offer is the problem of usability. You may find that different departments may have excellent BI solutions built up that work well for their needs. But there’s no way to share this information with others who can benefit from it, because it’s so customised for that particular team’s needs. What we do with SWIFTWatch, therefore, is create data warehouses divided into general subjects (eg traffic flow, message costs, billing data) so that all the different players in the institutions can access it and do the analyses that meet their particular needs. By making the data easy to access and query, thanks to the Cognos PowerPlay interface we use, we help the banks unlock the power of their own data, to benefit activities across their operations and business.

FST. BI can help improve the overall performance of the company. Are there any other less obvious benefits it can achieve?
MS. At the level of the individuals in the institution, a really tangible benefit is simply wasting less time. Our customers tell us horror stories about having to first create spreadsheets each month manually in order to be able to understand and process the basically ‘raw’ data they have gathered. This happens across the institution – whether it’s someone in billing and collections entering the numbers of all the invoices for branches in each country, or someone in product management gathering data from various sources to establish market share figures. Well-designed BI not only makes people’s daily work lives a lot easier, it gives them the time to contribute their own intelligence to their jobs.

FST. Could you tell us a little about Cognos solutions, and how they can help enterprises achieve better agility and efficiency? (Particularly in the financial services sector if possible.
MS. PowerPlay lets us get critical business data directly to our customers’ desktops. This means that people from any team or location of a financial institution that subscribes to SWIFTWatch have ready access to clearly-presented information – they don’t have to waste time searching for information from various sources, nor do they have to spend time figuring out what it means. SWIFTWatch's PowerPlay interface makes complicated data easy to understand and to analyse.

FST. How do you foresee BI evolving over the next five years?
MS. Rather than make any predictions, I’m going to express a wish on behalf of many of our customers from the business side of the financial industry: keep bringing easy-to-use BI to our desktops.

These business users don’t want complicated tools that require them to invest significant effort to master. They want the facts now, and they want to be able to explore the data to draw their own conclusions, and then they want the BI to do some analyses for them (such as exceptions alerts).

It’s a sophisticated BI tool that can deliver this flexibility and apparent simplicity to the end user – and products like Cognos PowerPlay and ReportNet help us deliver BI that our industry needs right to the desktop of any user in the institution.

Beth Smits can be contacted at beth.smits@swift.com