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IBM Industry Models Customer References
NLB Customer Reference Video
Interview with Erik Alic, Data Warehouse Project Manager, NLB D. D., Ljubljana, Slovenia
As-Produced Transcript
NLB is a leading financial and banking institution in Slovenia. It has more than 30% of the market share and it’s spreading through Central and Eastern Europe. You have a market growth of 100% per year in that part of world, so this is the place to be.
The main challenge is to build the enterprise data warehouse so that you have a single point of truth for everybody -- for the marketing, for the risk department, for the finance department. Without integrated information, you don’t have a holistic view of a customer.
Before the IBM Data Warehouse, we had different data warehouse attempts which were actually siloed one by another and that affected, of course, consistency of the data which you have. In case anytime you have more than one warehouse there is inconsistency, there is no doubt. After implementing IBM Data Warehouse, there is only one and there is a single point of truth, as we say in the industry.
Legislation is actually quickly changing in the past few years and as I see with Basel II requirements, you have to be able to accommodate very quickly on one side. On the other side, you have to do the marketing. And if you are bringing those two things together in a single integrated environment, you can have a kind of synergy because you are doing things only once and you are reusing them again and again. This is the idea of the warehouse in the first place -- to reuse it, to reuse the data that you already have, to store it in the right format, in the right place at a right time…and just get going.
IBM DB2 is one of the strategic platforms for the company and that’s why we decided to build a Data Warehouse on the DB2. And besides that, we have a banking data model which actually fits into it and the bank as a whole has a lot of IBM’s products including WebSphere.
When we chose IBM, we chose it also because we get the development methodology with it. We don't want to reinvent the wheel 20 times again. So you refer to the model and you go to it, you use it, you use it as a business catalyst. The more you use it, the more you will get and that’s why we are doing more than one project with the warehouse area at the time.
One of the most impressive returns-on-investment has been in direct marketing where we were able to close 11% of the mails we actually sent and this is a very high standard. That means when we sent 100 mails to potential customers, 11 actually did close the business.
A good example in efficiency is when a person in the risk department told me that before the Banking Data Warehouse implementation of IFRS standard for provisions, he needed one month to do the job. Now, they need one day.
I think that today if you are in banking, you actually cannot live without the Data Warehouse because you need it for marketing reasons, you need it for risk reasons, you need to have it because of the compliance. So without the Data Warehouse today, you simply cannot live any longer.
We find IBM reliable as a partner. In fact our relationship with IBM has resulted in this extraordinary IBM Banking Data Warehouse which we developed over the past five years and I think we are all happy with it and we are the winning team.