Many Financial Services organisations have realised the need to develop an enterprise-wide platform to manage information and turn it into 'business intelligence'.
Business Intelligence (BI) technologies can help financial institutions to manage risk, detect fraud, leverage customer insights and gain visibility into their profitability, but few have deployed them to maximum effect.
Furthermore, the Financial Services industry is being forced to undergo sweeping changes in the wake of corporate scandals such as those at Enron, WorldCom, and Parmalat.
This, combined with the threat of terrorist attacks post 9/11, has driven governments and regulators to respond with a whole raft of legislation intended to restore public confidence.
Compliance is becoming a major driver for investment in BI throughout the Financial Services sector.
Financial institutions are now expected to have and use the right data - to know their customers - and to demonstrate that management is in control of every process.
Butler Group is advocating the implementation of a strategic, enterprise-wide, integrated and end-to-end BI solution.
Planning for future requirements and going beyond current legislation, the Report pinpoints the essential features that address the needs of different organisations.
Two particular open standards that can be highlighted are Common Warehouse Metamodel and XBRL: the former concerns the need for a single and unified metadata repository within an organisation, the standard enables inter-operability between compliant tools; XBRL is the new standard adopted by regulatory bodies for financial reporting - all organisations will need to submit financial reports in XBRL.
The key findings from the Report can be summarised as follows: Business Intelligence (BI) technologies can help financial institutions to manage risk, detect fraud, leverage customer insights and gain visibility into their profitability, but few have deployed them to maximum effect.
Established BI tools face competition in the Financial Services sector both from vertically focused operational and analytic application vendors, and also from in-house custom development.
No vendor yet offers all the required components to deliver true 'closed loop' BI across the enterprise, so solutions must be built around open standards with a unified Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM)-compliant metadata repository.
Compliance necessitates integrated business intelligence, but this should be seen as a strategic investment opportunity and used to create competitive advantage.
Vendors offering overlapping technologies can give a head start.
Data accuracy, consistency, and completeness, always important, are given greater urgency by compliance.
Routine integration and analysis of both structured and unstructured data, in near real time, will require a more sophisticated architecture with fast XML message handling, anticipating growth in XML, for example eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) reporting.
Microsoft is turning traditional enterprise reporting into a commodity, forcing established players to find strategies to differentiate themselves.
Ad hoc , self-service reporting and analysis are increasingly demanded by customers as a vehicle for widening the use of BI within the organisation.