Peer-to-Peer

Speedy processing of business data

The MAIA 1KEY BI provides the Edelweiss Group with a single view of enterprise-wide data and delivers a scalable and extendible financial data model, which helps in making faster decisions. By Akhtar Pasha

The Edelweiss Group is one of the leading financial services company in India providing a wide range of services to corporates, institutions and high networth individuals. It is a broadly based financial services group with operations spanning investment banking, brokerage services, asset management and loans. To understand and maintain the profitability of its financial services, the company maintained vast amounts of transactions and customer information. However, its existing Excel-based data tools were lacking key functionalities and did not support the depth and complexity of business insight necessary to grow the business.

Inadequate insight to support operations

Prashanth Pereira, Vice President–Technology & Operations, Edelweiss Capital Limited said, “Being part of the financial services market where information changes every few seconds or minutes, it is imperative that faster the organization is updated with accurate information, the more informed and therefore, better decisions it can make.” He continued, “Being in the financial services business, every trading hour is crucial and if we lose one hour of trading time loss, it would translate to loss of business opportunity hurting the business.”

Limitations of legacy applications

Edelweiss Capital has multiple applications such as (Edelworld, Omnesys, Comtek, Portfolio Management Service or PMS, CRM, Fixed Deposits) to manage its business operations across the Group. The standard and traditional reporting options which come built into these legacy systems had its own limitations. The issue goes beyond mere speed and accuracy, which are important parameters by themselves, explained Pereira. He added that the key to any reporting and business intelligence tool being applied successfully lies in the quality of input data. A good amount of work has been put into that basic requirement. This is one of the areas which otherwise had a lot of requirement for human intervention.

Another area of concern was the multiple systems and sources of data, and their varied formats being used for data analysis. Without a BI tool, it would have been difficult to bring these together meaningfully. While it is pertinent that data as available in the source systems cannot be used in their raw form, such data has to be collated in one place and certain rules passed on them. Pereira said, “Primary data feed formats include databases, Excel files and flat files. The entire process involved improving our legacy systems on the one hand, and creating tools to clean the inconsistencies and churn the output of these systems on the other. Users were aware of the existing errors in the outputs and were appreciative of the need to standardize and clear the inconsistencies.” This proved to be a major plus as it ensured end-user buy-in. Processes were improved or modified to accommodate such changes.

For instance, in certain businesses, users were persuaded to capture data in specified formats only. These included creating data type constraints in the input applications and even Excel files.

On another occasion, using the report iteratively and taking learnings from the trends of these reports, the businesses were in a position to provide better service and focus to clients that mattered.

In one more case, revenue details had to be drilled down into in a variety of parameters. Data inputs come in from legacy trading systems, CRM applications, bespoke SQL databases, along with Excel dumps. This conglomeration of data had to be churned and divided into several cubes, which used to take a long time to collate the data and do analysis—leading to delay in servicing clients.

Working in silos

Without a unified solution delivering near real-time data to all relevant departments, it was much more difficult to craft targeted marketing initiatives, to determine the accountability of each of the Relationship Managers (RMs) in servicing clients, whether or not they meet their daily tasks and targets. Marketers, for example, could not monitor the progress of campaigns to attract new customers. Sales could not track how well existing customers were being served. And risk managers could not search for suspicious transactions on a daily basis, making initiatives to identify and predict fraud much less effective than they should be.

Different businesses had varying needs from a BI tool at Edelweiss. Some businesses were unable to put a tangible figure to the effectiveness of the RMs making calls. For example, if RMs were supposed to make 50 calls in a day to clients during the trading time explaining them about the markets and taking fresh market position to take the advantage of day’s high/low, there was no mechanism to find out if they had done their daily task or not. Additionally, preparing reports after the day’s closure of market used to anything from 48 hours to 7 days because the company had to dip into each of the Excel sheets to pull the data and people had to sit analyzing the reporting before presenting the final report to the client. Pereira said, “We would not know if the RM had called up and met all the clients he was supposed to or not. In the event of an RM not meeting the client and not fulfilling the client’s requirement, there were chances of losing the client to the competition—leading to loss of opportunity and revenue.”

Certain other businesses found it difficult to correlate business provided by the client vis-à-vis efforts spent thereon. A major part of the concern was the speed and accuracy of reliable MIS. Analytical reports were worked upon with major dependencies and were prone to human error. Pereira added there was only so much that legacy applications could do under these circumstances, “We needed to go beyond that to reap benefits out of the ability to utilize available information in the way we wanted. There is a solution called Heat Map delivered for two of our line of businesses. With a clearer understanding of where effort has to be put in, the businesses are now able to target the right kind of clients—according to the business that a client provides.”

No help to top management for taking on-time decisions

Customer service levels and revenue generation go hand in hand, averred Pereira. Analytical data relating to clients in terms of their categories had to be mapped to the effort put in behind each. So also business generated from a client vis-à-vis the effort. Other requirements include trend analysis of business provided by a client. Additionally, revenue details had to be drilled down to in a variety of parameters, including client level trends, revenue analysis, revenue reconciliation reports, and so on, eating into productive time.

Pereira said, “Legacy tools can only go this far. There is no alternative to a full-featured BI tool when it comes to intelligent reporting.”

Investing in MAIA

Edelweiss Capital had evaluated a number of vendors before it finally chose 1KEY BI from MAIA Intelligence. Pereira said, “We were looking for a solution that would address our business needs effectively while at the same time is cost friendly. Therefore, the primary reason for going with MAIA 1KEY was the value for money factor. We primarily look for companies who are idea hungry and are keen to develop and implement cutting-edge solutions while displaying passion in their work. We felt MAIA fitted in well with that philosophy.”

He added further, MAIA Intelligence is a growing company, and Edelweiss has traditionally believed in providing young and fledging businesses with opportunities to grow. This way, Edelweiss also benefits from their drive, innovation, constant upgrades and improvements. Last year the Web-enabled version named 1KEY Agile was launched. Now APIs also are in place to seamlessly integrate 1KEY with legacy applications.

Rolling out 1KEY BI

The company started small and the usage grew in phases. Certain existing reports in one line of business were first targeted. Once the concept was proven, other requirements of the same business, as well as other businesses came onto the bandwagon. MAIA 1KEY has been used to roll out over 150 small and big reports across the group for over 200 users.

Adding business value

MAIA 1KEY as a BI tool is being utilized by the Edelweiss Group in a host of different and dynamic ways—right from generating analytical reports from data marts to integrating with legacy applications and bespoke solutions to provide on-the-fly and statistical reports.

The regular benefits of quick and accurate output being critical in decision-making definitely accrues. Cost savings are the default benefits from this implementation. However, besides that, using the report iteratively and taking learning’s from the trends of these reports, the businesses were in a position to provide better service and focus to clients that mattered. Pereira explained now business users can do slicing and dicing of information with dynamic and cube reports. Revenue MIS reports required by the top management are sent on daily basis from 1KEY BI to take business decisions. “We have done a programming in Avaya systems wherein all clients’ numbers are stored in it. Using 1KEY we can generate reports on how many calls a RM has made [denoted with green color in report], how many was missed [seen in red color] and not acted as amber color. So the immediate managers take this report and look into the red and amber colors and take appropriate business actions—leading to faster decisions,” he added.

Faster time to market and response

1KEY BI had helped to cut downtime. Being in the financial market where information is critical and keeps changing every few seconds/ minutes, reports that took at least a couple of hours can be done in seconds. “Therefore, the faster you get your information, the better and faster decisions you can make,” pointed out Pereira. Edelweiss gets automated MIS reports, where the accuracy is better since the whole thing is completely systems driven. He explained that each major

implementation of 1KEY has reaped benefits. BI solutions assist in making better decisions by providing more accurate data each time and help to produce quicker decisions by providing data several times faster.

Another major benefit of BI is in terms of the quality of decisions arising out of analytical reports, trend analysis and statistical analysis. Given these benefits it can be surmised that the investment has been paid for several times over.

IT infrastructure running 1KEY

Edelweiss Capital has bought enterprise-wide license for unlimited user of 1KEY Agile BI Suite, which includes many modules and it uses generic Intel Xeon-based servers that run Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and uses SQL Server 2005 as database.

akhtar.pasha@expressindia.com