Cognos, a business intelligence and corporate performance management (CPM) Vendor, has announced that SWIFT, the co-operative that supplies standardised messaging services and interface software to financial institutions worldwide, will use Cognos Enterprise BI to underpin the online reporting and analysis capabilities for its recently launched SWIFTWatch portfolio.
SWIFT is a financial industry-owned co-operative servicing over 7 800 financial institutions in more than 200 countries. With the SWIFTWatch portfolio, financial institutions within the SWIFT community will have access to predefined online reports, dashboards and data analysis tools to better monitor different aspects of their business, including traffic flows, market share, messaging costs and expenses. Overall, the new system is designed to help companies improve operational efficiency, increase customer knowledge and enrich their sales and marketing efforts.
"We find that financial services institutions are adopting enterprise business intelligence dashboards as a pervasive and attentive eye to gauge process and system performance throughout their service delivery chain," says Guillermo Kopp, vice-president at TowerGroup, a leading research and consulting firm that specialises in the global financial services industry.
"Such transparency allows institutions, industry utilities and networked service providers to improve operational efficiency by establishing peer learning and accountability at all levels."
In selecting a reporting and analysis platform, SWIFT needed a Web-based solution that was scalable, intuitive and secure. Data transferred between financial institutions is very sensitive, so the solution had to guarantee that banks will not see competitor message traffic and will only have access to their own data. SWIFT ultimately chose Cognos Enterprise BI, anchored on Cognos PowerPlay and Cognos ReportNet.
Leveraging Cognos Enterprise BI, SWIFTWatch users receive a global overview of traffic and expenses, while product and marketing managers gain more detailed insights into the volume, cost and market share of their business activity over SWIFT. The Cognos solution only requires a Web browser, so no software installation is needed. From anywhere in the world, managers receive regular and timely data updates, compare data over multiple periods and export data to other applications. Standard reports containing overview traffic or cost data are also available to download, providing immediate highlights and trends.
"Cognos Enterprise Business Intelligence gives our members greater insight into message traffic and costs, and enables them to analyse trends over time, drill down from summary data to in-depth data and present data in different formats," says Andr'e Boico, director of marketing at SWIFT. "This new generation of reporting and analysis provides both internal and external monitoring tools, which are essential in the heavily competitive industry in which our members operate today."
The SWIFTWatch portfolio consists of two fundamental components - SWIFTWatch Reports and SWIFTWatch Analyser. SWIFTWatch Reports provide powerful business and market reporting via subscription. SWIFTWatch Analyser consists of traffic, message cost and billing modules to enable sales, marketing and finance staff to explore data interactively and easily identify trends and exceptions.
"SWIFTWatch gives our sales force the data they need on a day-to-day basis to monitor the reciprocity of their correspondent relationships," says Johan Gernaey, SWIFT coordinator at KBC Bank & Insurance Group, a Belgian independent, multi-channel bancassurance company that caters to over 11 million customers across Europe. "Since the new tool is online and user-friendly, we will be able to expand its benefits to all major KBC entities, giving them a powerful set of management information tools to support strategic decisions."
"SWIFT is a highly respected organisation in the financial community and we are delighted to have been selected to deliver such valuable insight into market performance," says Laurence Trigwell, senior financial services director at Cognos. "In being able to monitor message traffic by region and counterparty, banks are able to benchmark their organisation more accurately. SWIFT itself will also be able to capitalise on the Cognos solution to identify and advise customers how they could be more efficient by routing more messages over the SWIFT network."
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