Business Intelligence for the Banking Industry

The banking sector can handle very large volumes of data, often transnational. Investment vehicles and instruments come and go at alarming speed, and performance intelligence on these products is vital. Coupled with this are increasing regulatory pressures and overriding security concerns.

The data banks need is very often spread across several systems and more than one time zone. This is made more complex where mergers and acquisitions have combined organisations using different systems. It is impossible to meaningfully analyse such huge volumes of data, so breaking it down into dimensional hierarchies in a data warehouse is essential. Data cubes such as the Cognos Powercube are very popular in the banking environment for this reason. Cognos 8 provides an online equivalent which allows more flexibility in reporting and analysis.

The large amount of data handled often presents problems loading the data, and then being able to quickly sift though it. Consequently you will usually see several highly skilled people in the IT departments of banks, including experienced database administrators (DBA), systems administrators, systems architects and various types of business intelligence specialists.