Interbank, the leading consumer financial lending institution in the Netherlands, has installed Sunopsis' market leading data integration software into its IT operation.
Interbank, part of the ABN AMRO banking giant, manages 2 billion euros in assets and services the financial requirements of tens of thousands of customers each year. Interbank needed to obtain a better understanding of the risk factor of each potential customer to tailor a competitive risk-based pricing offer that minimises risk to the bank.
Interbank selected Sunopsis' data integration software solution to help it achieve two major objectives. Firstly as the old data warehouse-based reporting application was no longer suitable, Interbank needed to collect vast amounts of data in a new data warehouse to develop the scorecards required for this risk analysis. The second key objective of the bank was to manage customer lifetime value, by storing data on all customers and all loans that were granted to them.
The platform chosen for the data warehouse was DB2 on IBM iSeries servers – the strategic computing of Interbank. As Leon Schurgers, Director of Information Technologies of Interbank, explains: "We needed to identify a data integration software running on the iSeries server, and one that would take advantage of the architecture of this system."
Sunopsis is a versatile data integration product that leverages the computing platforms of the enterprise by generating native SQL. With the help of F-IT-C, Sunopsis' distributor for The Netherlands, Interbank started an evaluation of Sunopsis. As Jean-Luc Dumont, Managing Partner of F-IT-C explains: "Unlike several other well established products that Interbank evaluated, Sunopsis runs natively on the iSeries server and provided unmatched performance during the evaluation process."
After 3 months of development, the first topic area of the data warehouse was already in production. "Sunopsis is an incredibly powerful development environment," comments Leon Schurgers. "Not only have our development teams increased their productivity by at least 50%, but Sunopsis also helps them to better structure their work, and to produce data interfaces that are better documented and easier to understand."
The productivity gains of Sunopsis have not been limited to development. The savings in terms of loading of the data warehouse have also been significant: "The loading process that used to take 8 hours is now executed in less than 2 hours – even though the amount of data and the complexity of the transformations have increased dramatically," explains Leon Schurgers. When asked about the value of this project for the business of Interbank, Leon Schurgers comments: "Being able to correctly profile each client based on the risk has allowed us to significantly increase our market share – by 50% last year! The new data warehouse was a clear success factor in that increase."
With the final parts of the data warehouse nearing completion, Interbank is looking at other possible uses of Sunopsis. "To streamline our business, we need to improve the integration of our banking systems, our collection systems, and our front office systems," comments Leon Schurgers. "Today, this is done via batch exchanges and some EDI interfaces. But we need to not only better automate these exchanges, but also to bring them toward real-time." Sunopsis, with its real-time integration capabilities, will again be a perfect fit for Interbank's application integration needs.