Cognos solutions for banking

Multiple delivery channels. Market specialization. High-profile mergers and acquisitions. Growing compliance requirements. Rising operational costs. For banking institutions worldwide, today's business climate is increasingly high stakes and complex. Better customer service without compromising profitability is critical.

Retail banks must:

• Maximize profitability by improving channel and product productivity and performance, gaining visibility into the most profitable customers, increasing revenue from new business and via cross-sell and reducing high delinquency rates, defaults and losses.
• Be more efficient-See the big picture fast by bringing together the relationships, connections, direction and details needed to make informed decisions and improve operating performance.
• Reduce risk by linking data in disparate systems for a clear, holistic view of profitability tied to consolidated view of risk.

IBM Cognos software provides an integrated, best-practices solution for banking performance management. It integrates and extends your critical data, and delivers the scorecarding, reporting, analysis and planning tools you need to manage and enhance profitability and performance. With integrated plans, business intelligence and metrics, you can dramatically improve your understanding of the current state of your organization and improve your ability to make timely, informed decisions in all areas-operations, sales and marketing, risk management, customer service, finance and more.

Increase profitability:

• Monitor and report on sales and margin performance by customer, channel, product line, branch region or division.
• Develop financial metrics to track costs, losses and risk-based returns; or customer loyalty and margin metrics (products sold, revenue, customer risk).
• Create a customer-centric view and client-level plans that incorporate the full scope of a customer’s relationship, including retail accounts, investment accounts, life insurance policies, loans and leases.
• Integrate demographic or customer data into internal sales data to analyze and flag marketing, up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.

Maximize efficiency:

• Improve efficiency of front, middle and back-end functions by setting targets and monitoring the processes.
• Develop long-range, financial, cost center and headcount plans, forecasts and budgets across the enterprise.
• Create branch profitability models to capture loan and deposit volumes and spreads, net interest income, staffing decisions and compensation expenses.
• Track financial goals in terms of growth, profitability and key controllable expenses.
• Monitor straight-through processing initiatives to gain timely, in-context views of operational efficiency.
• Extend extranet capabilities to customers, partners, brokers, and suppliers.

Reduce risk:

• Manage risk across the organization to deliver enterprise risk reporting to support a broad range of reporting requirements from a central, consistent source.
• Undertake “what-if” analysis to identify best use of capital, both on the basis of product and customer profitability and in the wider context of the customer relationship across the business as a whole.
• Implement best practices for fraud identification, asset liability management, rapid depreciation detection and a host of other risk factors.
• Analyze enterprise risk patterns, model risk events and proactively alert managers and senior executives to pre-determined risk events or breaches.
• Respond to external key influencers, such as rating agencies and supervisors, to ensure a lower cost of capital.
• Conduct what-if scenarios for different revenue projections or changes in business lines.