Asia Capital Improves Insight into Business and Investment Performance and Risk for Better Services to Investors
 
 

Asia Capital Improves Insight into Business and Investment Performance and Risk for Better Services to Investors

  • Oracle Customer:  Asia Capital
    Location:  Colombo, Sri Lanka
    Industry:  Financial Services
    Employees:  300
    Annual Revenue:  Under $100 Million

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Asia Capital PLC is one of largest investment banks listed on the Colombo Stock Exchange, with interests in the financial, securities, leisure, wealth management, IT solution development, and digital entertainment markets.

The company comprises Asia Securities, an equity market and brokerage firm; Asia Asset Finance, a bank registered with the Central Bank of Sri Lanka; and Asia Leisure, which owns a chain of boutique hotels. It also operates Asia Wealth Management Company, which incorporates Asia Capital’s equity research, corporate finance, and fixed income business, and Asia Digital Entertainment, which produces TV, cinema, and mobile content.

Asia Securities used a legacy application to generate reports that help managers assess the business and financial performance of various stocks, manage client profiles, and calculate business risk. These reports were produced using data from its core transaction processing system and data repository that stores up to 100 million market transactions.

In early 2011, Asia Securities realized that these reports were too limited and didn’t provide senior managers with the information needed to optimize business performance and uncover the risks—to clients and the firm itself—associated with investing in a portfolio of stocks.

The organization needed an integrated business intelligence application that would enable these managers—initially at Asia Securities and later at other Asia Capital subsidiaries—to improve client service by gaining more insights into business performance, risks, and customer relationships.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Asia Capital

  • “Oracle Business Intelligence gives our strategic and tactical business managers insight to manage the business and make the right investment decisions, based on the true value of each stock. This significantly improves the service they provide to clients.” – Dishan Fernando, Project Manager, Strategic Initiatives, Asia Capital PLC

  • Improve client services by deploying an integrated business intelligence application that provides managers in various business sectors and other strategic leadership teams with better insights into business performance, risks, and customer relationships
  • Reduce the time to create detailed reports that help assess the risks of stock portfolios managed by the organization

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Engaged Oracle Partners DMS Software Technologies and AbbuSys to help deploy Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition, initially at the company’s stock broking group Asia Securities, to improve client service
  • Provided comprehensive reporting on millions of market transactions for around 70,000 customers, storing these transactions in Oracle Database
  • Enabled senior managers to immediately uncover key information about stock trends and business performance by channel, region, investment advisor, and customer segments, compared to previously taking several hours to generate these types of reports
  • Allowed business and finance managers to easily assess the risk of investing in an organization’s stock by providing instant access to decision variables, compared to previously taking up to 30 minutes to prepare similar recommendation reports for clients
  • Implemented a dashboard to generate stock performance reports almost instantly, rather than spending time asking an analyst to provide qualitative and quantitative data for a specific stock
  • Enabled managers to better identify the performance of their clients’ investments in certain vertical markets—such as banking and retail—over time
  • Accessed the latest and most comprehensive trading history at any time of the day, by channel, branch, customer segment, investment advisor, and customer to reduce the risk that managers would make decisions based on limited information
  • Allowed financial managers to make better decisions about whether to invest a client’s money in a certain stock, by generating a detailed credit risk analysis report, based on investment advisors, business type, and regulatory requirements

Why Oracle

Asia Capital Chairman Manohan Nanayakkara realized the organization’s competitive edge depended on implementing a leading business intelligence solution. After evaluating similar products from Cognos, IBM, and Microsoft, Nanyakkara and his team decided Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition would best meet Asia Capital’s and Asia Securities’  needs.

The organization was already using Oracle Database and Oracle E-Business Suite and was in the process of deploying other Oracle technologies, such as Oracle GoldenGate, across the group of companies.

“Oracle solutions are an integral part of our IT landscape, so it became clear that Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition was the right solution,” said Rajitha Basnayake, CIO, Asia Capital.

Implementation Process

Asia Capital engaged AbbuSys in May 2011 to deploy Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition at Asia Securities. During the next four months, AbbuSys worked with Asia Capital’s IT team to map out the organization’s business requirements.

AbbuSys also determined the critical success factors, key performance indicators, transaction analytics, and reports Asia Capital wanted to create before implementing the solution.

User acceptance testing was completed in December 2011 and the solution went live in February 2012.

Partner

Asia Capital engaged AbbuSys in May 2011 to deploy Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition at Asia Securities. During the next four months, AbbuSys worked with Asia Capital’s IT team to map out the organization’s business requirements.

AbbuSys also determined the critical success factors, key performance indicators, transaction analytics, and reports Asia Capital wanted to create before implementing the solution.

User acceptance testing was completed in December 2011, and the solution went live in February 2012.

DMS Software Technologies responded to Asia Capital’s initial request for proposal and appointed AbbuSys to deploy the solution.

AbbuSys worked with Asia Capital’s IT team to understand the organization’s business, legacy applications, data structures, and data marts, before developing a solution roadmap that would ensure the project ran smoothly.

“AbbuSys staff worked with our key users and helped them understand how to best use Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition before completing user acceptance testing,” said Basnayake.

AbbuSys’ IT team fine-tuned and optimized the solution during the go-live stage. This ensured the project went live in a tight seven-month time frame.