i-flex set to revel with ‘Reveleus’

After hitting a home run in core banking with Flexcube, i-flex has ‘Reveleus’, a product suite that helps banks take advantage of Business Intelligence and data warehousing tools to serve retail customers better, says Srikanth R P

i-flex has formed a separate subsidiary to ensure that Reveleus gets a branding distinct from Flexcube, says S Ramakrishnan

With regulatory provisions such as Basel II expected to come into force, Reveleus, an i-flex subsidiary is eyeing a significant share of the risk management market. Basel II is a set of rules and regulations for measuring the operational risk of a bank. It requires banks to make their systems and processes compliant with standards that have been laid down by the Bank for International Settlem-ents (BIS). Non-compliance with Basel II (it takes effect in 2006) will lead to penalties, therefore banks and financial institutions will have to buy software that can provide them with a basic framework for complying with these regulations.

Reveleus has already releas- ed a framework called ‘Reveleus Basel II’ that provides banks with a set of analytics and metrics to help them comply with Basel II risk management requirements. This is one of many BI tools that Reveleus offers.

BI for banking

While the BI space is cluttered with more vendors than you can shake the proverbial stick at, Reveleus is betting on its unique positioning to gain market share. While other vendors in the BI space provide either broad suites of horizontal applications (HR, budgeting or customer service analytics) or standalone industry-specific ones (churn solutions for telecom, fraud detection for financial services etc), Reveleus has tried to bridge the gap between these segments of the analytical applications market. It does this by letting organisations develop custom analytical applications based upon a common data management architecture. This is an advantage as most analytical software is deployed on a departmental basis leading to the proliferation of individual data marts for each and every application. This results in the creation of islands of information. Worse, an organisation ends up with inconsistent processes and data representation that hamper its ability to conduct accurate cross-functional analysis across departments.

Reveleus provides both pre-packaged analytical applications and data warehousing tools as well as industry-specific content. Analysts such as IDC believe that the company has tackled the issues of data integration and consolidation. As the underlying data architecture is unified metadata, it ensures that users get a consistent view across departments.

A case in point

An i-flex client that serves as a good example is HDFC Bank. It has deployed Reveleus at its finance, marketing and IT business units. Prior to the Reveleus deployment, the bank’s data warehousing team had to create data extracts directly from its transactional systems. As the product ensures common data definitions, the time taken to provide analysed data to the business units has shrunk. While Reveleus is positioned against big names in the BI space, S Ramakrishnan, CEO, Reveleus believes that the company has an advantage due to its positioning and its b domain knowledge in the financial services space. Reveleus has already made inroads into the US market with big names such as American Stock Exchange and the International Monetary Fund on its client roster. Other bigwigs on the company’s list are the National Stock Exchange of India, Antwerp Diamond Bank and Investcorp Bank.

A bold move

That i-flex does not want Reveleus to be shadowed by its largest selling product, Flexcu-be, can be gauged from the fact that the company formed a separate subsidiary to ensure that Reveleus gets a branding distinct from Flexcube. i-flex’s gamble has paid off as close to 50 percent of Reveleus’ customers are organisations that do not use Flexcube.

With regulatory pressures mounting on banks and financial institutions, analysts expect Reveleus to be one of the top gainers. While the product faces competition from a range of vendors in the enterprise applications space, the company’s b domain knowledge coupled with unique positioning could prove to be a key differentiator in a highly competitive market.

srikanth@expresscomputeronline.com