Business Objects Global Services helped St.George move to the latest release to take advantage of its expanded functionality, improved performance, and ease of use.

Australia's fifth largest bank, St.George has more than 1,200 users who leverage Business Objects to help the company monitor and improve performance and provide better service to customers.

St.George is one of the top 15 publicly listed companies by market capitalization in Australia, and employs over 8,500 people. Its national operations span all aspects of the financial services industry, including retail banking, institutional and business banking, and wealth management. St.George has a philosophy of continuous service improvement and maintaining a close relationship with customers. Business Objects plays an important role in helping St.George provide outstanding service to customers and differentiate itself from competing banks.

St.George uses BusinessObjects XI Release 2 for a wide range of reporting and analysis functions within their business, including sales analysis, operational risk analysis, and compliance reporting. St.George also uses Business Objects to help improve the time to market of loans originated by the bank. Using reports and dashboards, employees continually monitor the time to completion of a loan - from the time a customer makes the initial loan inquiry to execution of the loan. They can quickly analyze how long it takes to move the loan through each stage of the process, and identify ways to streamline their business processes and leverage best practices to remove bottlenecks. By easing the loan process for customers, St.George has been able to gain a competitive edge in the market.

St.George originally deployed Business Objects in 2004 to help consolidate the eight different business intelligence solutions used throughout the organization. The bank wanted to move onto one platform to streamline administration and gain a complete and accurate view of their disparate data. In February of 2006, St.George decided to upgrade its business intelligence deployment to BusinessObjects XI Release 2 to take advantage of the significant improvements in performance, as well as several new functionalities of the XI platform. To ensure a smooth transition, the bank worked closely with Business Objects Global Services to scope the project and help manage the migration from start to finish.

"The move to BusinessObjects XI Release 2 has been great for us, as we have seen significant performance gains and more people are asking for access and new developments every day," said Gary Carter, General Manager of IT Relationships and Group Data Warehouse for St.George Bank. "Some of the larger reports and more advanced queries used to take several minutes to complete, and now they can take as little as a few seconds. Performance is a must have, as it helps our employees be more productive and encourages them to use Business Objects in more aspects of their job. We were very impressed with the work of the Business Objects Global Services team on our migration, and we look forward to continuing to expand the use of our Business Objects deployment to improve our business and our customer services."

"With deployments at 40 out of the top 50 banks in the world, Business Objects is quickly becoming the de-facto business intelligence standard in the banking industry," said Robb Eklund, vice president of industry marketing at Business Objects. "BusinessObjects XI Release 2 provides banks like St.George with a powerful platform to gain greater insights into their customers and business operations to drive improved performance. Business Objects understands the unique pressures of the banking industry, and our business intelligence solutions help these organizations more easily leverage their data to develop effective business strategies and make better decisions."