Australia's Westpac has gone live with Oracle's E-Business Suite and General Ledger. With 500 users nationwide and more than 200 users concurrently accessing the software, the General Ledger implementation is one of the largest in the world and processes nearly 1 million journals daily.
Westpac has also deployed Oracle purchasing, payables and fixed assets to summarise and analyse all financial transactions at the bank.
Warren Dunne, head of financial systems for Westpac Bank, says: "Because Oracle General Ledger is scalable and flexible, we can account for all of the bank's operations using a single chart of accounts, ultimately providing us with additional information needed for decision-making and removing the necessity for expensive reconciliation processes."
He says the bank's upgrade to the Oracle E-Business Suite has resulted in significant improvements in the performance and manageability of the its accounting processes. Overnight batch processing has reduced elapsed time by 40 percent, says Dunne, while the performance of some Oracle8i database operations has improved by more than 100 percent.
Seperately, Oracle says it has implemented its profitability and cost analysis solution Compas at US bank First Union. Based on the Financial Data Manager, Transfer Pricing and Performance Analyser modules, Compas is being used to calculate customer account level profitability for nearly 20 million First Union accounts. In total, the Compas database currently processes over 35 million records each month, encompassing the entire spectrum of First Union's retail and wholesale business activities.