The Edelweiss Group is one ofthe leading financial servicescompany in India providing a

wide range of services to corporates,institutions and high networth

individuals. It is a broadly basedfinancial services group with opera-tions spanning investment banking,brokerage services, asset manage-ment and loans. To understand and

maintain the profitability of itsfinancial services, the companymaintained vast amounts of transac-tions and customer information.However, its existing Excel-baseddata tools were lacking key func-tionalities and did not support thedepth and complexity of businessinsight necessary to grow the business.

Inadequate insight to supportoperations

Prashanth Pereira, VicePresident–Technology & Operations,Edelweiss Capital Limited said,“Being part of the financial servicesmarket where information changesevery few seconds or minutes, it isimperative that faster the organiza-tion is updated with accurate infor-mation, the more informed andtherefore, better decisions it canmake.” He continued, “Being in thefinancial services business, everytrading hour is crucial and if we loseone hour of trading time loss, itwould translate to loss of businessopportunity hurting the business.”

Limitations of legacy applications

Edelweiss Capital has multipleapplications such as (Edelworld,Omnesys, Comtek, PortfolioManagement Service or PMS, CRM,Fixed Deposits) to manage its busi-ness operations across the Group.The standard and traditional report-ing options which come built intothese legacy systems had its ownlimitations. The issue goes beyondmere speed and accuracy, which areimportant parameters by themselves,explained Pereira. He added that thekey to any reporting and businessintelligence tool being applied suc-cessfully lies in the quality of inputdata. A good amount of work hasbeen put into that basic requirement.This is one of the areas which other-wise had a lot of requirement forhuman intervention.

Another area of concern was the

The MAIA 1KEY

BI provides the

Edelweiss Group

with a single view

of enterprise-wide

data and delivers a

scalable and

extendible financial

data model, which

helps in

making faster

decisions. By

Akhtar Pasha

INSIGHT FOR MANAGING TECHNOLOGY

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Management

Speedy processing of business data P E E R - T O - P E E R

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multiple systems and sources ofdata, and their varied formats beingused for data analysis. Without a BItool, it would have been difficult tobring these together meaningfully.While it is pertinent that data asavailable in the source systems can-not be used in their raw form, suchdata has to be collated in one placeand certain rules passed on them.Pereira said, “Primary data feed for-mats include databases, Excel filesand flat files. The entire processinvolved improving our legacy sys-tems on the one hand, and creatingtools to clean the inconsistenciesand churn the output of these sys-tems on the other. Users were awareof the existing errors in the outputsand were appreciative of the need tostandardize and clear the inconsis-tencies.” This proved to be a majorplus as it ensured end-user buy-in.Processes were improved or modi-fied to accommodate such changes.

For instance, in certain business-es, users were persuaded to capturedata in specified formats only. Theseincluded creating data type con-straints in the input applicationsand even Excel files.

On another occasion, using thereport iteratively and taking learn-ings from the trends of thesereports, the businesses were in aposition to provide better serviceand focus to clients that mattered.

In one more case, revenue detailshad to be drilled down into in a vari-ety of parameters. Data inputs comein from legacy trading systems, CRMapplications, bespoke SQL databas-es, along with Excel dumps. Thisconglomeration of data had to bechurned and divided into severalcubes, which used to take a longtime to collate the data and doanalysis—leading to delay in servic-ing clients.

Working in silosWithout a unified solution deliv-

ering near real-time data to all rele-vant departments, it was muchmore difficult to craft targeted mar-keting initiatives, to determine theaccountability of each of theRelationship Managers (RMs) inservicing clients, whether or notthey meet their daily tasks and tar-gets. Marketers, for example, couldnot monitor the progress of cam-paigns to attract new customers.Sales could not track how well exist-ing customers were being served.And risk managers could not searchfor suspicious transactions on adaily basis, making initiatives toidentify and predict fraud much lesseffective than they should be.

Different businesses had vary-ing needs from a BI tool atEdelweiss. Some businesses wereunable to put a tangible figure to

the effectiveness of the RMs mak-ing calls. For example, if RMs weresupposed to make 50 calls in a dayto clients during the trading timeexplaining them about the marketsand taking fresh market position totake the advantage of day’shigh/low, there was no mechanismto find out if they had done theirdaily task or not. Additionally,preparing reports after the day’sclosure of market used to anythingfrom 48 hours to 7 days becausethe company had to dip into eachof the Excel sheets to pull the dataand people had to sit analyzing thereporting before presenting thefinal report to the client. Pereirasaid, “We would not know if theRM had called up and met all theclients he was supposed to or not.In the event of an RM not meetingthe client and not fulfilling theclient’s requirement, there werechances of losing the client to thecompetition—leading to loss ofopportunity and revenue.”

Certain other businesses foundit difficult to correlate businessprovided by the client vis-à-visefforts spent thereon. A major partof the concern was the speed andaccuracy of reliable MIS.Analytical reports were workedupon with major dependenciesand were prone to human error.Pereira added there was only somuch that legacy applicationscould do under these circum-stances, “We needed to go beyondthat to reap benefits out of theability to utilize available informa-tion in the way we wanted. Thereis a solution called Heat Mapdelivered for two of our line ofbusinesses. With a clearer under-standing of where effort has to beput in, the businesses are nowable to target the right kind ofclients—according to the businessthat a client provides.”

No help to top management fortaking on-time decisions

Customer service levels and rev-enue generation go hand in hand,averred Pereira. Analytical datarelating to clients in terms of theircategories had to be mapped to theeffort put in behind each. So alsobusiness generated from a client vis-à-vis the effort. Other requirementsinclude trend analysis of businessprovided by a client. Additionally,revenue details had to be drilleddown to in a variety of parameters,including client level trends, rev-enue analysis, revenue reconcilia-tion reports, and so on, eating intoproductive time.

Pereira said, “Legacy tools canonly go this far. There is no alterna-tive to a full-featured BI tool when itcomes to intelligent reporting.”

Investing in MAIAEdelweiss Capital had evaluated

a number of vendors before it final-ly chose 1KEY BI from MAIAIntelligence. Pereira said, “We werelooking for a solution that wouldaddress our business needs effec-tively while at the same time is costfriendly. Therefore, the primary rea-son for going with MAIA 1KEY wasthe value for money factor. We pri-marily look for companies who areidea hungry and are keen to developand implement cutting-edge solu-tions while displaying passion intheir work. We felt MAIA fitted inwell with that philosophy.”

He added further, MAIAIntelligence is a growing company,and Edelweiss has traditionallybelieved in providing young andfledging businesses with opportuni-ties to grow. This way, Edelweissalso benefits from their drive, inno-vation, constant upgrades andimprovements. Last year the Web-enabled version named 1KEY Agilewas launched. Now APIs also are inplace to seamlessly integrate 1KEYwith legacy applications.

Rolling out 1KEY BIThe company started small and

the usage grew in phases. Certainexisting reports in one line of businesswere first targeted. Once the conceptwas proven, other requirements of thesame business, as well as other busi-nesses came onto the bandwagon.MAIA 1KEY has been used to roll outover 150 small and big reports acrossthe group for over 200 users.

Adding business value MAIA 1KEY as a BI tool is being

utilized by the Edelweiss Group in a

Being in the financial marketwhere informationkeeps changingevery few seconds/minutes,reports that took acouple of hours canbe done in seconds

Prashanth PereiraVICE PRESIDENT–TECHNOLOGY & OPERATIONS,EDELWEISS CAPITAL LIMITED

Being in the financial services business, every trading hour is crucial and if we lose one hour of trading time, it would translate to loss ofbusiness opportunity

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host of different and dynamicways—right from generating analyt-ical reports from data marts to inte-grating with legacy applications andbespoke solutions to provide on-the-fly and statistical reports.

The regular benefits of quickand accurate output being criticalin decision-making definitelyaccrues. Cost savings are thedefault benefits from this imple-mentation. However, besides that,using the report iteratively and tak-ing learning’s from the trends ofthese reports, the businesses werein a position to provide better serv-ice and focus to clients that mat-tered. Pereira explained now busi-ness users can do slicing and dicingof information with dynamic andcube reports. Revenue MIS reportsrequired by the top managementare sent on daily basis from 1KEYBI to take business decisions. “Wehave done a programming in Avayasystems wherein all clients’ num-bers are stored in it. Using 1KEY we

can generate reports on how manycalls a RM has made [denoted withgreen color in report], how manywas missed [seen in red color] andnot acted as amber color. So theimmediate managers take thisreport and look into the red andamber colors and take appropriatebusiness actions—leading to fasterdecisions,” he added.

Faster time to market andresponse

1KEY BI had helped to cut down-time. Being in the financial marketwhere information is critical andkeeps changing every few seconds/minutes, reports that took at least acouple of hours can be done in sec-onds. “Therefore, the faster you getyour information, the better andfaster decisions you can make,”pointed out Pereira. Edelweiss getsautomated MIS reports, where theaccuracy is better since the wholething is completely systems driven.He explained that each major

implementation of 1KEY has reapedbenefits. BI solutions assist in mak-ing better decisions by providingmore accurate data each time andhelp to produce quicker decisions by providing data several timesfaster.

Another major benefit of BI is interms of the quality of decisionsarising out of analytical reports,trend analysis and statistical analy-sis. Given these benefits it can besurmised that the investment has been paid for several times over.

IT infrastructure running 1KEYEdelweiss Capital has bought

enterprise-wide license for unlimit-ed user of 1KEY Agile BI Suite,which includes many modules andit uses generic Intel Xeon-basedservers that run Microsoft WindowsServer 2003 and uses SQL Server2005 as database.

akhtar.pasha@expressindia.com

The company started small andthe usage grew in phases

Speedy processing of business data