Challenges

• Minimize operating costs across 2,500 branches by providing real-time financial analyses of customer data from systems used for core banking, domestic and foreign treasuries, customer accounts, and human resources applications
• Quickly and automatically access transactional data to complete real-time market, liquidity, and interest rate risk analyses, rather than compiling information manually from spreadsheets 
• Improve analysis and dissemination of transactional and customer information by enabling users to connect to multiple data sources from a single screen
• Cut the time taken to create planning reports for things such as distribution of branch staff and infrastructure (for example, ATMs) by gaining instant access to customer and business-performance data
• Reduce the time taken to complete performance assessments by providing fast access to information about each branch’s achievements against revenue targets and compliance with the bank’s standard systems and processes

Solutions

• Deployed Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle Essbase to improve risk management and costing models to better allocate resources and minimize operational costs across branches
• Enabled 2,000 staff, including general, regional, and branch managers, to make better decisions about where to place operational resources by analyzing and monitoring information—such as the status of customers accounts, changes to credit limits, loan repayment schedules, and income leakage—from core banking and treasury systems
• Allowed the bank to perform real-time analysis and generate financial reports using a single tool rather than deploying multiple applications, which helped lower IT costs and boost staff productivity, resulting in saving US$2 million
• Improved the quality of transactional and customer information and reduced data duplication and errors by 65%
• Reduced the time it took to create plans—covering staff distribution; infrastructure, such as new branches and ATMs; and office equipment—by 45 work days (with one work day equivalent to one day’s work by one person) per year as data about the performance of each branch was available immediately, removing the need to manually collate information from regional offices
• Created a risk management model that enabled the bank to instantly assess market risks rather than spending up to two days per week, sifting through multiple spreadsheets
• Gained a 360-degree view of customer data, which enabled branch staff to identify opportunities to cross-sell the bank’s products to various customer segments
• Cut the time it took to examine the annual performance of 2,500 branches by one day per branch, by providing inspectors with instant access to information about revenue, deposits, and recovery targets, as well as systems and procedures
• Deployed Oracle Essbase to complete multidimensional analyses of balance sheet data, such as for assets and liabilities, and to forecast business performance using methods, including linear regression and double- and triple-exponential moving averages
• Expected to integrate the Oracle solution with a geospatial system to depict business intelligence information on a map of India, which will provide users with a graphical view of various customer segments by region

Why Oracle

Indian Overseas Bank used Oracle Database, Oracle Express, and Oracle Discoverer to build its data warehouse in 2001, so it made sense to keep using Oracle technologies.

“Oracle Express also reached end of life in December 2010, so we decided that a move to
Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle Essbase would benefit the organization,” said S. Radhakrishnan, general manager, IT, Indian Overseas Bank.

“During the proof-of-concept evaluation, we discovered that Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition could connect to our Sybase and Oracle databases, and it would enable us to do real-time data analysis,” he continued.

“We also realized that the migration would be relatively quick because historical data in our data warehouse could be connected to Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition without the need to do any extra work.”

Implementation Process

Between May and October 2010, Indian Overseas Bank engaged Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services to train its IT team to deploy and use Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle Essbase.

The solution was subsequently tested and deployed to the bank’s branches, and its central and regional offices.