Oracle Integrates Financial Services Apps with BI
By CXOtoday Staff
Mumbai, Apr 26, 2007

Oracle today announced the release of Oracle Financial Services Profitability Analytics, which provides a prebuilt business intelligence (BI) application on Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition (Oracle Business Intelligence Suite EE) 10g Release 3 for Oracle Financial Services Applications (OFSA).

This will provide financial institutions a comprehensive and robust solution that delivers actionable insight to employees, helping them improve customer service and drive new levels of profitability. The integrated solution also helps organizations reduce total IT cost and complexity as it removes the need for custom interfaces between the two systems.

The OFSA suite helps financial institutions carry out critical functions like funds transfer pricing, customer profitability management, budgeting and planning, and risk management efficiently. Oracle Business Intelligence Suite EE 10g Release 3 is a major new release of Oracle's comprehensive, standards- based suite of BI infrastructure and tools products.

Oracle Financial Services Profitability Analytics (OFSPA) enables banks to effectively use BI to manage their operations and business performance through insight-driven actions. The integrated solution - which allows access to information through virtually any medium, including alerts, dashboards, reports and RSS feeds - helps users understand how actions taken in one area of the business affect the performance of other areas. Out-of- the-box integration helps to facilitate deployment and reduce total cost of ownership because it eliminates the need for custom-built interfaces between OFSA and Oracle Business Intelligence Suite EE.

"Today, many financial institutions find that solid business intelligence is essential to market differentiation and enhanced customer satisfaction," said Ashwin Goyal, Vice President, Financial Services, Oracle. "Oracle Financial Services Profitability Analytics makes it easier to achieve this objective. It provides a pre-integrated, enterprise-wide and actionable business intelligence system that helps individuals in a financial institution - from the executive suite to the local branch - to make the right decision at the right time."

OFSPA-which integrates Oracle Business Intelligence Suite EE and OFSA - provides high-performance, rapidly deployed analytics to users across the enterprise and allows a financial services organization to take full advantage of its existing infrastructure, reporting tools and legacy investments while leveraging the wealth of data in the OFSA data model. It also integrates with existing business processes and workflows with extended Web services support with Oracle Fusion Middleware

Traditional BI solutions are typically confined to one subject or functional area and, therefore, cannot provide insight across the financial institution's value chain. The resulting single-function or single-product view of the business makes it extremely difficult to make optimal decisions.

Oracle Financial Services Profitability Analytics overcomes this limitation by combining analytical capabilities with the depth of OFSA models and applications to deliver insight around critical business elements, including customer service, compliance, risk and profitability.

For example, the solution can help an organization determine customers' value across all product lines and the organization's response to total customer needs. It can also help a financial institution accurately identify and determine the demographic characteristics of its most profitable customers as well as provide automated ranking of those customers. In addition, Oracle Financial Services Profitability Analytics can help to identify opportunities for migrating customers to higher-profit offerings. Performance insight is delivered on a risk-adjusted basis so that not only return, but risk, is measured and monitored.

Oracle Financial Services Profitability Analytics empowers all users in the organization with access to a range of intelligence and analysis forms that are tailored to their personalized needs. The solution delivers interactive dashboards, ad hoc intuitive reporting, alerts, scenarios based on what-if analysis and waterfall list creation within a single, fully integrated framework. Now, information system users can find information as diverse as customer relationship or profile data, profitability indicators and compliance data in one comprehensive, reconciled spot.

Oracle delivers a single, logical view of all enterprise data that reconciles back-to-source systems, such as general ledger or transactional systems, but has the flexibility to view and analyze information in a manner consistent with a financial organization's unique needs. With Oracle Financial Services Profitability Analytics, an organization is not bound to inflexible ledger account structures or static views of information. All relevant enterprise data sources, from transactional systems to one-off spreadsheets, can be used as source information with Oracle Business Intelligence Suite EE's "hot-pluggable" support for both Oracle and non-Oracle data sources.