5.3.05
Knowledge Management: Aiming For Better Insight Into Clients
Automating customer info allows banks and brokers such as Raymond James and ING Belgium to analyze data at a higher level, which aids in service and marketing
By Shane Kite
More banks and brokers are tapping knowledge management to understand their businesses and customers, whether it's in tailoring marketing campaigns for specific segments or to comply with reporting requirements.
After automating and centralizing core customer information, many banks are taking the next step and installing overlay applications to analyze the reams of data that they've managed to digitize. Providing desktop access to the information gives senior management, financial advisors and customer service representatives descriptive, electronic views of historical transactional and general account data.
Raymond James, for instance, is using Boise, ID-based ProClarity's Analytics Platform to analyze all of its customer assets and revenue streams. The application acts as a front-end to Microsoft's OLAP or multidimensional "cube-based" database. As opposed to a regular relational database with indexes and separate tables, OLAP technology pre-aggregates information and builds complex data structures or multi-dimensional indexes for varied analysis.
The ProClarity platform acts as an interface to slice and dice information using any field as an index. "It's different from traditional reporting," says Jay Bentley, vp of IT and strategic development at Raymond James. "There are lots of Web reporters out there that can look at a database but this lets you take and move any column over and make it an index to drill into analytical situations."
The St. Petersburg, FL-based broker is rolling out the application to its 5,000 financial advisors, as well as to regional and senior managers. Advisors access a Web-based version securely through a Virtual Private Network app. Management uses a more powerful, desktop-based analytics engine secured by VPN hardware.
Marketers, analysts, and senior management use the tool to structure sales efforts around specific demographic details and product holdings. Financial advisors with 300 or 400 accounts can cull the same customer demographics, or a regional manager can look at statistics of all the branches in one area."We had a lot of good transactional systems that let them look at a customer in a household at an individual level, but this really lets them analyze all of their customers," Bentley says.
While the rollout continued at press time, the application had already enabled a fixed-income sales effort molded during testing of the system last year among the broker's high-net worth segment. "Wealth management is obviously a big focus these days," says Carole Torreano, vp of IT at Raymond James. "This allows us to focus on particular products, such as fixed income, which those people tend to purchase."
Says Bentley: "You can say 'show me all of the people that are older than 65 that hold mutual funds,' and then of those, you want to know which ones have a net worth of $1 million or more. All of the fields become ways for you to group and filter the data."
According to ProClarity CFO Phil Bradley, banks are using knowledge management or business intelligence (BI) solutions primarily "to understand which of their customers and products are profitable and which ones aren't, but also for portfolio risk management, where they have concentrations of assets that may give rise to unusual risks."
Banks are applying BI platforms to both sell and manage risk. Uses include everything from scenario-planning to assess whether a consolidation makes sense, to project performance measurement on specific sales efforts.
BI efforts in risk analysis and financial reporting have risen as regulatory scrutiny has increased. "There's a whole corporate risk, performance management, risk-regulation area that's created the need for more accurate and timely decision-making," says Gartner analyst Mary Knox. "Regulations like Sox [Sarbanes-Oxley] and Basel II are really making people look at how they are structuring data. We see a renewed interest in data quality as a result."
According to Gartner's "Magic Quadrant" study on BI solutions, released last year, pure-play BI providers include MicroStrategy, Applix, arcplan and ProClarity. Some major enterprise platform vendors have begun to sell their own knowledge management applications, the study says, such as SAS, Hyperion Solutions, Oracle and SAP.
Document automation for some banks has enabled better risk management and auditing that is in turn boosting customer service. ING Belgium, for instance, is using Clearstory's Radiant Business Document Server (formerly called ESP+) and Radiant Document Imaging to electronically archive all of its records and images, including brand graphics. Video and audio files may be next, according to Jean-Paul Hainaux, a technical leader at ING in Brussels.
Implementing the solution has cut down on the time that is required to search and access content, he says, and enabled the broker to offer new on-line services to customers. ING clients can now access a historical library of their account statements back to January 1997 from a single interface. Both cashier and customer can view the statement on-line or via the network.
"This is of high value if a customer is audited or is refinancing," Hainaux says. "This way our help desk employees can electronically view the same document as the paper document received by the customer, so when clients call the help desk all of their documents are instantly available to the person taking their call."
Such statements have traditionally been stored on microfiche. Finding, printing and mailing such documents remains a costly and time-consuming process for many banks.
The ING unit is also using the platform to archive historical data for journal or general ledger accounting, as well as for other storage mandated by the legal and compliance department, such as for credit contracts, mortgages and human resource documents. Transaction logs are also archived for ATM banking. The system stores a journal for transactions at every cash machine.
Via its Radiant suite, Westborough, MA-based Clearstory also enables the digital validation of client signatures. The signature is scanned, archived in the system, and then made available among departments and branches throughout the network. "This allows our clients to go to any location for service because we can authenticate them everywhere," Hainaux says.
Solutions like Radiant from ClearStory competes primarily with the other document imaging and archiving providers, such as 1mage, FileNet and Scansoft.
Wilmington Trust uses Clearstory's product for archiving its mainframe legacy reports on disk and optical disk-based storage mediums. The Wilmington, DE-based institution had previously been transferring documents to microfiche, or simply printing hard copies. Now users view reports through either a Web interface or a "thick-client" desktop solution.
"We're saving a ton of paper," says Ed Olkowski, data center manager at Wilmington Trust.
The firm uses a digital annotation feature offered in the system-like an electronic sticky note-to confirm reviews of daily reports for auditing control and compliance. "That's being heavily used, especially with regulations like Sarb-Ox," Olkowski says.
Digitizing Wilmington's reporting environment has had another benefit, he says: better security. "If you're putting that report out onto a secure database structure or file, you can determine who can look at that and who cannot. There's also no worry about leaving a pack of microfiche somewhere that somebody could just put in their pocket and walk away with." ¶ 08:35
By Shane Kite
More banks and brokers are tapping knowledge management to understand their businesses and customers, whether it's in tailoring marketing campaigns for specific segments or to comply with reporting requirements.
After automating and centralizing core customer information, many banks are taking the next step and installing overlay applications to analyze the reams of data that they've managed to digitize. Providing desktop access to the information gives senior management, financial advisors and customer service representatives descriptive, electronic views of historical transactional and general account data.
Raymond James, for instance, is using Boise, ID-based ProClarity's Analytics Platform to analyze all of its customer assets and revenue streams. The application acts as a front-end to Microsoft's OLAP or multidimensional "cube-based" database. As opposed to a regular relational database with indexes and separate tables, OLAP technology pre-aggregates information and builds complex data structures or multi-dimensional indexes for varied analysis.
The ProClarity platform acts as an interface to slice and dice information using any field as an index. "It's different from traditional reporting," says Jay Bentley, vp of IT and strategic development at Raymond James. "There are lots of Web reporters out there that can look at a database but this lets you take and move any column over and make it an index to drill into analytical situations."
The St. Petersburg, FL-based broker is rolling out the application to its 5,000 financial advisors, as well as to regional and senior managers. Advisors access a Web-based version securely through a Virtual Private Network app. Management uses a more powerful, desktop-based analytics engine secured by VPN hardware.
Marketers, analysts, and senior management use the tool to structure sales efforts around specific demographic details and product holdings. Financial advisors with 300 or 400 accounts can cull the same customer demographics, or a regional manager can look at statistics of all the branches in one area."We had a lot of good transactional systems that let them look at a customer in a household at an individual level, but this really lets them analyze all of their customers," Bentley says.
While the rollout continued at press time, the application had already enabled a fixed-income sales effort molded during testing of the system last year among the broker's high-net worth segment. "Wealth management is obviously a big focus these days," says Carole Torreano, vp of IT at Raymond James. "This allows us to focus on particular products, such as fixed income, which those people tend to purchase."
Says Bentley: "You can say 'show me all of the people that are older than 65 that hold mutual funds,' and then of those, you want to know which ones have a net worth of $1 million or more. All of the fields become ways for you to group and filter the data."
According to ProClarity CFO Phil Bradley, banks are using knowledge management or business intelligence (BI) solutions primarily "to understand which of their customers and products are profitable and which ones aren't, but also for portfolio risk management, where they have concentrations of assets that may give rise to unusual risks."
Banks are applying BI platforms to both sell and manage risk. Uses include everything from scenario-planning to assess whether a consolidation makes sense, to project performance measurement on specific sales efforts.
BI efforts in risk analysis and financial reporting have risen as regulatory scrutiny has increased. "There's a whole corporate risk, performance management, risk-regulation area that's created the need for more accurate and timely decision-making," says Gartner analyst Mary Knox. "Regulations like Sox [Sarbanes-Oxley] and Basel II are really making people look at how they are structuring data. We see a renewed interest in data quality as a result."
According to Gartner's "Magic Quadrant" study on BI solutions, released last year, pure-play BI providers include MicroStrategy, Applix, arcplan and ProClarity. Some major enterprise platform vendors have begun to sell their own knowledge management applications, the study says, such as SAS, Hyperion Solutions, Oracle and SAP.
Document automation for some banks has enabled better risk management and auditing that is in turn boosting customer service. ING Belgium, for instance, is using Clearstory's Radiant Business Document Server (formerly called ESP+) and Radiant Document Imaging to electronically archive all of its records and images, including brand graphics. Video and audio files may be next, according to Jean-Paul Hainaux, a technical leader at ING in Brussels.
Implementing the solution has cut down on the time that is required to search and access content, he says, and enabled the broker to offer new on-line services to customers. ING clients can now access a historical library of their account statements back to January 1997 from a single interface. Both cashier and customer can view the statement on-line or via the network.
"This is of high value if a customer is audited or is refinancing," Hainaux says. "This way our help desk employees can electronically view the same document as the paper document received by the customer, so when clients call the help desk all of their documents are instantly available to the person taking their call."
Such statements have traditionally been stored on microfiche. Finding, printing and mailing such documents remains a costly and time-consuming process for many banks.
The ING unit is also using the platform to archive historical data for journal or general ledger accounting, as well as for other storage mandated by the legal and compliance department, such as for credit contracts, mortgages and human resource documents. Transaction logs are also archived for ATM banking. The system stores a journal for transactions at every cash machine.
Via its Radiant suite, Westborough, MA-based Clearstory also enables the digital validation of client signatures. The signature is scanned, archived in the system, and then made available among departments and branches throughout the network. "This allows our clients to go to any location for service because we can authenticate them everywhere," Hainaux says.
Solutions like Radiant from ClearStory competes primarily with the other document imaging and archiving providers, such as 1mage, FileNet and Scansoft.
Wilmington Trust uses Clearstory's product for archiving its mainframe legacy reports on disk and optical disk-based storage mediums. The Wilmington, DE-based institution had previously been transferring documents to microfiche, or simply printing hard copies. Now users view reports through either a Web interface or a "thick-client" desktop solution.
"We're saving a ton of paper," says Ed Olkowski, data center manager at Wilmington Trust.
The firm uses a digital annotation feature offered in the system-like an electronic sticky note-to confirm reviews of daily reports for auditing control and compliance. "That's being heavily used, especially with regulations like Sarb-Ox," Olkowski says.
Digitizing Wilmington's reporting environment has had another benefit, he says: better security. "If you're putting that report out onto a secure database structure or file, you can determine who can look at that and who cannot. There's also no worry about leaving a pack of microfiche somewhere that somebody could just put in their pocket and walk away with." ¶ 08:35
