IBM recently announced that Central Bank of India, a premier bank in India, is leveraging on its analytics solution to enhance its financial management processes which includes activities ranging from budgeting to forecasting to liquidity management. The bank according to IBM, is one of the few public sector banks achieving complete automation of corporate performance management activity on a bottoms-up approach.
The constantly changing regulatory environment and the desire to uncover deeper customer insight from massive data, were among the key drivers behind the bank’s decision to streamline its financial systems.
“With the rapid explosion of big data, collecting, sourcing and analyzing real-time data from multiple sources is a growing challenge for banks,” said Jeby Cherian, Vice President and Managing Partner, Global Business Services, IBM India/South Asia. “IBM’s solution will help convert data into insights that will enable better decision-making and risk management to maximize profits while enhancing customer loyalty.”
According to IBM, with the adoption of the company’s analytics solution, the bank is now able to gain better insight into branch and regional office performance, allowing for further flexibility and quicker shifts in strategy to drive improved results while also maintaining regulatory compliance.
It has moved away from spreadsheet based planning to a smarter process that analyzes daily financial data based on actual performance and potential for growth. Equipped with specialized planning features, and simplified data capturing at the branch and regional office level, the IBM solution has helped the bank to uncover new sources of customer value.
The entire budgeting exercise of the Bank is now conducted through IBM’s solution which is said to cut planning cycle time in half and significantly improve accuracy of financial reporting, by automating previously time consuming manual processes and ensuring that systems across the bank’s locations and product lines are interconnected.
This is enabling the bank to get real-time insight on performance efficiency as well as the capability to track deposits, loans and non-performing loans data on a daily basis. Another key part of the bank’s transformation was the implementation of the Static Asset Liability Management Solution which enables it to reduce liquidity risk and also minimize impact of interest rate and foreign exchange rate movements. According to IBM, the bank has achieved total automation of this tedious and time consuming process by consolidating approximately 7.5 million deals and trade positions across the company.
“The power of analytics is that it gives us more confidence in our financial reporting, leading to faster, more responsive decision-making.” said Mr. M V Tanksale, Chairman and Managing Director, Central Bank of India. “With Single Data Repository solutions, the Bank can gain more visibility inside its own business as well as identify more profitable customers. Thus, these solutions provide great levers for us to identify cross-sell and up-sell opportunities and increase customer wallet share.”
Central Bank of India also engaged IBM to implement Single Data Repository in addition to its analytics solution. After full implementation, the Bank will be able to get a consistent, 360-degree view of each customer across all bank branch and product lines and uncover hidden insights in customer data, so as to anticipate needs, reduce churn, increase wallet share and make smarter decisions that maximize customer satisfaction and profitability.