Retail bank branches are under pressure today to deliver accurate, timely profitability plans that are aligned with corporate revenue objectives. Traditional banking solutions like ERP, branch teller and platform systems, or spreadsheets are typically not designed to handle sophisticated, branch network-wide planning, modeling and budgeting.

The new Cognos Branch Performance Blueprint was developed to help retail banks perform detailed top-down and branch-up revenue and expense planning to ensure organization-wide alignment with strategic objectives. The solution extends the critical planning process beyond the finance department to the branch network, enabling managers to drive profitability planning, analysis and reporting at the product and customer segment levels.

Anchored on Cognos Planning and Cognos 8 BI and based on banking industry best practices, the Cognos Branch Performance Blueprint allows bank managers to benefit from:

• Driver-based planning for more granular management of key revenue and expense lines
• Flexible initiative planning to better mobilize new product introductions, marketing campaigns and other branch-level initiatives
• Position-level branch staff planning for strong headcount expenditure control
• Break-back functionality to automatically pro-rate revenues, margins or costs to meet goals
• "What-if" modeling and analysis to best determine the impact of decisions using multiple scenarios
• Intuitive dashboards to monitor and analyze performance indicators at various levels
• Integrated workflow capabilities to facilitate enterprise collaboration and accountability

"Planning is about more than developing a budget. Innovative banks are looking to develop more adaptive processes for planning and forecasting that are based on key business performance drivers, enabling changes based on underlying business activity," said Mitch Max, managing partner for The Performax Group, and director of financial services for the Beyond Budgeting Round Table. "Decentralized banks also require an efficient means of linking central operations costs to branch-level business activity. By linking accurate cost information to adaptive planning and performance management, the Cognos Branch Performance Blueprint delivers an integrated capability that leading banks have been seeking."

To ensure profitability plan accuracy, all data is delivered through Acorn System's Profit Analyzer, which uniquely assigns general ledger costs and resources through business processes to precisely determine the baseline cost and profitability of individual customers, segments, channels, branches, products and even transactions, based on historical performance. With greater confidence in these numbers, branch managers can spend less time on calculations, focusing on executing initiatives and improving performance.

"Some of the world's largest financial service institutions, including retail banks, utilize Acorn's solution for a sustained, enterprise view of their business performance which is both financially and operationally validated," said Chris D. Fraga, chief strategy officer at Acorn Systems, Inc. "In addition to knowing historically where they are making and losing money across their business, retail banks want to leverage this foundation of insight to more effectively plan to drive future performance. The integration of Acorn's accurate content with Cognos Planning and BI combines all the right ingredients to enable a retail bank to achieve a past, present and future view of their business in order to drive increased profits and shareholder value."

Developed by the Cognos Innovation Center for Performance Management, the Cognos Branch Performance Blueprint consists of targeted, pre-built data, process and policy models based on proven best-practices in bank operations planning, budgeting and forecasting. The solution equips customers with all of the necessary technology and process design choices, enabling them to synchronize and coordinate financial and operational plans in order to make better resource allocation decisions, from the corporate center down to the branch network.

"Branch performance is at the very core of retail banking success. Aligning branch operations with the bank's overall plans and objectives is critical for growth and solidifying customer loyalty," said Laurence Trigwell, senior director of financial services solutions at Cognos. "Our Cognos Branch Performance Blueprint provides both world-class BI and high-participation planning, helping banks achieve consistent operating performance through collaborative, real-time planning, forecasting, analysis and reporting. This inevitably leads to increased revenues, higher profits and a stronger customer experience and corporate brand."

Cognos Branch Performance Blueprint is the first in a series of financial services industry-specific solutions, and is available immediately to Cognos customers. To date, Cognos offers a full suite of Performance Blueprints that cover a wide spectrum of planning and performance management process areas, such as strategic financial planning and forecasting; sales planning and forecasting; workforce planning; expense planning; and capital expenditure planning. Cognos Performance Blueprints are a key component within the Cognos Performance Management System, which brings together technology, best practices, analytical applications and a broad network of partners into a single performance management solution.