Situation

Banking has evolved from single institutions serving the needs of local residents and merchants into an industry of dynamic organizations that provide highly-valued financial services from strong institutions that are, increasingly, becoming strategic business units of super-community, regional, and global financial services organizations. These financial services organizations seek to retain the competitive advantage of traditional personal service at local levels while leveraging the economies of scale from large organizations.

To accomplish this, business information must be made available to branch and customer-facing officers that will enable them to establish and maintain a productive balance between excellent customer service and effective business decisions.

Problems

Traditionally, financial information has been mainframe-generated variations of balance sheets and income statements for the finance department. To analyze and distribute information to the management team and the board, the Finance team – the CFO, Treasurer, Controller and other Financial managers and professionals – review each line of data, highlight meaningful information and manually enter this data into spreadsheets, so the information can be displayed graphically and formatted for presentation.

The following challenges are the result:

1. Highly-trained finance and accounting professionals spend a significant amount of time rekeying and pasting data into spreadsheets, leaving little time to analyze the information and provide recommendations. Time invested and resource costs are high.
2. By the time the information is developed, analyzed and distributed, the opportunity for business user analysis and decisive action has usually passed.
3. Extensive analysis is challenging because of the limits of spreadsheets and time.
4. Information is rarely provided to operations and customer-facing management to support real-time business decisions or to provide feedback on their business activities.

Opportunity

Finance organizations are being challenged by the board and the CEO to extend their financial knowledge and analytic skills to more directly support operating management. With competitive challenges, there is no longer time for finance and IS to develop and deliver hardcopy reports to branch and division management. Immediate access to a single source of accurate, consistent information is required to grow the bank in a profitable manner.

Solution

An enterprise financial reporting and analysis platform provides a single source for board and executive management reports, operating management reports and analysis, lending and retail banking professionals and the staff support team.

Business Intelligence, Inc. (BI) serves these needs with Financial Analytics, a library of financial reports and analytic models that are customized during implementation to incorporate each client’s unique organizational attributes, chart of accounts hierarchy and information interests.

Through Financial Analytics:

• Cutting, pasting and rekeying data into spreadsheets is eliminated – saving significant time and cost – by automating all data extract, transformation and loading into the enterprise data warehouse.

• Executives have personalized portals providing direct access to their own libraries of reports, analysis, exception analysis, and balanced scorecard metrics.

• Finance transforms the time spent rekeying and pasting information into spreadsheets, into business analysis and management recommendations for strengthening the business.

• Managers at all levels have secured access to daily, weekly and monthly income statements and performance metrics, as well as the ability to drill-through to the underlying details to quickly answer questions to support better decision-making.

Summary

Time and cost must be removed from developing and deploying financial reporting and analytics for performance-minded banks to strengthen growth and profitability and to stay competitive.