IBM (NYSE:IBM) today announced that the London branch of Deutsche Postbank AG is using a new IBM Smart Analytics system to help improve the quality and accuracy of its business reporting for risk monitoring, portfolio and collateral analysis.
The leading multichannel bank in the German market offering solutions for private, business and corporate clients, Deutsche Postbank's core business in London is corporate lending for commercial real estate (CRE). As a result, branch management demand accurate and timely management reports to help them make investment decisions.
Prior to implementing the IBM analytics system, CRE reporting for the bank was time consuming and involved multiple staff to manually collect data from disparate sources. Now, using IBM technology, the bank has a single view of business information and can make decisions based on up to date information.
IBM's Smart Analytics was chosen over offerings from Oracle, QlickView and Logica because it offered a fully integrated solution based on IBM's workload optimised systems and industry-leading IBM analytics and middleware. Utilising IBM's specialist industry-specific services, the system delivers an ideal business solution by enabling real-time access to vast amounts of complex data. .
Head of IT at Deutsche Postbank, Clarel Sookun, said: "The system has really proved its worth by reducing the time it takes to produce our reports for CRE from hours to minutes and they are 'accurate to the penny'.
The IBM system allows us to centrally store actual and reconciled data and gives us the ability to produce further management reporting at a higher quality level."
The success of the system has led to plans to extend it to the bank's finance operations, analysing loan and interest data, and performing 'what-if' scenarios using graphical data.
Sookun added: "The bank is now able to analyse data in different formats and produce subsets of reports as and when required, which used to be a very labour intensive task. Implementing the system also unexpectedly highlighted inaccuracies in our existing data and we are now confident in consistent, high quality reporting. The beauty of the new systemtem is that it can also integrate with our existing systems."
IBM has invested more than $14 billion in acquisitions to build an analytics portfolio which includes more than 24 acquisitions. In addition, IBM has assembled 8,000 analytics consultants with industry expertise, and opened a network of seven analytics centres of excellence.