Delivering insight to German banks

All banks are looking to their own data for better insight. FST spoke with Markus Bayha, Product manager for Business Intelligence Applications at FIDUCIA IT AG, about how it delivers insight to its bank partners in Germany.

FST. To get started, who is FUDICIA IT AG is and what services do you offer?
MB. Based in Karlsruhe, Germany, FIDUCIA IT AG (www.FIDUCIA.de) is the largest comprehensive outsourcing partner in the cooperative banking sector, serving more than 850 banks and 38 million banking customers in Germany. It is also renowned for its market-leading use of business intelligence (BI) – and its BI solution is considered the benchmark of the financial industry by the University of St. Gallen, Forrester Research, and Mummert & Partner. FIDUCIA’s ongoing success demands that it understand each bank’s information requirements and deliver a reliable, secure, complete set of IT services that meets these needs – all at a competitive cost. They also need to adopt emerging technologies that ensure that their banking customers can stay competitive.

FST. And what are the main stumbling blocks you may face when providing IT services and solutions for your customers?
MB. Banks don’t want to hear about technology. They want us to help them raise revenues and sales. As a technology provider, we have to meet their ever-evolving business requirements with standardized, integrated applications that are extremely easy to implement and use –and that assist all relevant processes. Our key challenge is to expand our ASP model to provide new capabilities, better information, and more transparency to our banking customers – while ensuring the simplicity, reliability, and security that these customers demand.

FST. In what way does BI lead to better decisions, improved performance and a competitive advantage over rivals?
MB. FIDUCIA has incorporated BI capabilities into its powerful agree banking system. The agree system serves as a standard user interface and puts Cognos BI capabilities at the fingertips of banking users, helping them know more about customers and make more informed business decisions. Key applications driven by this tool include:

• Market potential analysis. Banks can check the market potential by analyzing their current business-generating sales activities, based on regional demographics or buying patterns, as identified by internal knowledge or external demographic analysis.
• Sales channel usage analysis. This enables banks to analyze how customers are using their channels, including bank branches, ATMs, web use, and access via mobile phones. It also allows banks to optimize costs and drive use of its alternate or lower cost sales channels.
• Sales metrics system. This application provides defined metrics for sales analysis against benchmark data from FIDUCIA’s member banks (German banks function collaboratively, as well as competitively), providing a clear ranking of banks among their peers. With these capabilities, banks can gauge the effectiveness of their sales activity, learn from best practices, and adjust their strategies to get optimal results.
• Company-wide reporting system. With Cognos BI capabilities, banks can implement a company-wide reporting system with standard and ad-hoc reports.

FIDUCIA provides access to more than 4,500 attributes – most of them updated daily – from different legacy systems or external market data.

Business Intelligence is already an important part of our business model, of the services we offer our customers, and of our technology architecture. In the future, we will continue to build on this solid foundation – adding new capabilities that meet the needs of our banking customers.

For more information on the Cognos BI Solution for banks visit www.cognos.com/solutions/industry/banking-financial-services/index.html.