The bank will use the solution as its Management Information Systems platform going forward.

First National Bank provides commercial, retail and investment banking services to its customers. It needed an effective way to monitor the bank's performance and ensure compliance with new directives from Lebanon's Central Bank. It selected MBI having evaluated four other systems.

The bank is the first customer in the Middle East that will benefit from Misys Business Intelligence and will now be able to gain vital information for its business in the areas of financial analysis, profitability analysis & credit risk analysis.

"As the foundation of our MIS program, Misys Business Intelligence will help our managers to monitor our bank's performance closely against our established operational targets," states Antoine Wakim, Chief Financial Officer, First National Bank SAL. "One of MBI's greatest strengths is its ability to provide the proper level of detail to a particular user so that they see the exact type of information needed to make critical decisions. Another significant feature is the speed at which it can be implemented, which will enable us to derive business benefits faster than through other alternative solutions."

"Typical business intelligence projects can take over a year to implement and come with various risks and complications, comments Roy Froud, Director - Middle East & Africa, Misys. "Our new solution allows banks to deploy efficient business intelligence architectures in just a matter of months. Moreover, its use of the IBM Banking Data Warehouse model optimises logical data structures for fast and accurate segregation and analysis."

Misys Business Intelligence for retail banking specialises in financial, profitability and credit risk analyses. It is specifically suited for banks such as First National Bank that already use the Misys Equation as their core banking solution. MBI can be installed and put into production very rapidly at minimal risk. The combination of IBM tools, an intuitive interface and the business intelligence and retail banking expertise of Misys, brings further benefits to customers. The solution enables managers to make optimal decisions to improve liquidity and risk management as well as to increase performance.

Among the business benefits that MBI will specifically provide to First National Bank are desktop delivery of management information; "management by exception" functionality to inform managers of deviations automatically from a target or range; and "root-cause analysis" to identify problem areas. Data is delivered via dashboards, scorecards and reports which can be manipulated to provide several levels of visual information. The whole system will take less than 6 months to implement.