Management INSIGHT FOR MANAGING TECHNOLOGY
PEER-TO-PEER
Speedy processing of business data
The MAIA 1KEY maintain the profitability of its
financial services, the company
BI provides the maintained vast amounts of transac-
Edelweiss Group tions and customer information.
with a single view However, its existing Excel-based
of enterprise-wide data tools were lacking key func-
tionalities and did not support the
data and delivers a depth and complexity of business
scalable and insight necessary to grow the
extendible financial business.
data model, which
Inadequate insight to support
helps in operations
making faster Prashanth Pereira, Vice
decisions. By President–Technology & Operations,
Edelweiss Capital Limited said,
Akhtar Pasha “Being part of the financial services
market where information changes
every few seconds or minutes, it is
imperative that faster the organiza-
tion is updated with accurate infor-
mation, the more informed and
therefore, better decisions it can
make.” He continued, “Being in the
financial services business, every
trading hour is crucial and if we lose
one hour of trading time loss, it
would translate to loss of business
opportunity hurting the business.”
Limitations of legacy
applications
Edelweiss Capital has multiple
applications such as (Edelworld,
Omnesys, Comtek, Portfolio
Management 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 into
these legacy systems had its own
limitations. The issue goes beyond
mere speed and accuracy, which are
important parameters by themselves,
explained Pereira. He added that the
key to any reporting and business
intelligence tool being applied suc-
cessfully lies in the quality of input
data. A good amount of work has
T
he Edelweiss Group is one of individuals. It is a broadly based been put into that basic requirement.
the leading financial services financial services group with opera- This is one of the areas which other-
company in India providing a tions spanning investment banking, wise had a lot of requirement for
wide range of services to corporates, brokerage services, asset manage- human intervention.
institutions and high networth ment and loans. To understand and Another area of concern was the
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multiple systems and sources of the effectiveness of the RMs mak-
data, and their varied formats being ing calls. For example, if RMs were
used for data analysis. Without a BI supposed to make 50 calls in a day
tool, it would have been difficult to to clients during the trading time
bring these together meaningfully. explaining them about the markets
While it is pertinent that data as and taking fresh market position to
available in the source systems can- take the advantage of day’s
not be used in their raw form, such high/low, there was no mechanism
data has to be collated in one place to find out if they had done their
and certain rules passed on them. daily task or not. Additionally,
Pereira said, “Primary data feed for- preparing reports after the day’s
mats include databases, Excel files closure of market used to anything
and flat files. The entire process from 48 hours to 7 days because
involved improving our legacy sys- the company had to dip into each
tems on the one hand, and creating of the Excel sheets to pull the data
tools to clean the inconsistencies and people had to sit analyzing the
and churn the output of these sys- reporting before presenting the
tems on the other. Users were aware final report to the client. Pereira
of the existing errors in the outputs said, “We would not know if the
and were appreciative of the need to RM had called up and met all the Prashanth Pereira
standardize and clear the inconsis- clients he was supposed to or not. VICE PRESIDENT–TECHNOLOGY & OPERATIONS,
EDELWEISS CAPITAL LIMITED
tencies.” This proved to be a major In the event of an RM not meeting
Being in the financial services
plus as it ensured end-user buy-in. the client and not fulfilling the business, every trading hour is
Processes were improved or modi- client’s requirement, there were crucial and if we lose one hour of
fied to accommodate such changes. chances of losing the client to the trading time, it would translate to loss of
For instance, in certain business- competition—leading to loss of business opportunity
Being in the es, users were persuaded to capture opportunity and revenue.”
financial market data in specified formats only. These Certain other businesses found
where information included creating data type con- it difficult to correlate business Investing in MAIA
straints in the input applications provided by the client vis-à-vis Edelweiss Capital had evaluated
keeps changing and even Excel files. efforts spent thereon. A major part a number of vendors before it final-
every few On another occasion, using the of the concern was the speed and ly chose 1KEY BI from MAIA
report iteratively and taking learn- accuracy of reliable MIS. Intelligence. Pereira said, “We were
seconds/minutes, ings from the trends of these Analytical reports were worked looking for a solution that would
reports that took a reports, the businesses were in a upon with major dependencies address our business needs effec-
position to provide better service and were prone to human error. tively while at the same time is cost
couple of hours can and focus to clients that mattered. Pereira added there was only so friendly. Therefore, the primary rea-
be done in seconds In one more case, revenue details much that legacy applications son for going with MAIA 1KEY was
had to be drilled down into in a vari- could do under these circum- the value for money factor. We pri-
ety of parameters. Data inputs come stances, “We needed to go beyond marily look for companies who are
in from legacy trading systems, CRM that to reap benefits out of the idea hungry and are keen to develop
applications, bespoke SQL databas- ability to utilize available informa- and implement cutting-edge solu-
es, along with Excel dumps. This tion in the way we wanted. There tions while displaying passion in
conglomeration of data had to be is a solution called Heat Map their work. We felt MAIA fitted in
churned and divided into several delivered for two of our line of well with that philosophy.”
cubes, which used to take a long businesses. With a clearer under- He added further, MAIA
time to collate the data and do standing of where effort has to be Intelligence is a growing company,
analysis—leading to delay in servic- put in, the businesses are now and Edelweiss has traditionally
ing clients. able to target the right kind of believed in providing young and
clients—according to the business fledging businesses with opportuni-
Working in silos that a client provides.” ties to grow. This way, Edelweiss
Without a unified solution deliv- also benefits from their drive, inno-
ering near real-time data to all rele- No help to top management for vation, constant upgrades and
vant departments, it was much taking on-time decisions improvements. Last year the Web-
more difficult to craft targeted mar- Customer service levels and rev- enabled version named 1KEY Agile
keting initiatives, to determine the enue generation go hand in hand, was launched. Now APIs also are in
accountability of each of the averred Pereira. Analytical data place to seamlessly integrate 1KEY
Relationship Managers (RMs) in relating to clients in terms of their with legacy applications.
servicing clients, whether or not categories had to be mapped to the
they meet their daily tasks and tar- effort put in behind each. So also Rolling out 1KEY BI
gets. Marketers, for example, could business generated from a client vis- The company started small and
not monitor the progress of cam- à-vis the effort. Other requirements the usage grew in phases. Certain
paigns to attract new customers. include trend analysis of business existing reports in one line of business
Sales could not track how well exist- provided by a client. Additionally, were first targeted. Once the concept
ing customers were being served. revenue details had to be drilled was proven, other requirements of the
And risk managers could not search down to in a variety of parameters, same business, as well as other busi-
for suspicious transactions on a including client level trends, rev- nesses came onto the bandwagon.
daily basis, making initiatives to enue analysis, revenue reconcilia- MAIA 1KEY has been used to roll out
identify and predict fraud much less tion reports, and so on, eating into over 150 small and big reports across
effective than they should be. productive time. the group for over 200 users.
Different businesses had vary- Pereira said, “Legacy tools can
ing needs from a BI tool at only go this far. There is no alterna- Adding business value
Edelweiss. Some businesses were tive to a full-featured BI tool when it MAIA 1KEY as a BI tool is being
unable to put a tangible figure to comes to intelligent reporting.” utilized by the Edelweiss Group in a
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Speedy processing of business data
host of different and dynamic can generate reports on how many implementation of 1KEY has reaped
ways—right from generating analyt- calls a RM has made [denoted with benefits. BI solutions assist in mak-
ical reports from data marts to inte- green color in report], how many ing better decisions by providing
grating with legacy applications and was missed [seen in red color] and more accurate data each time and
bespoke solutions to provide on-the- not acted as amber color. So the help to produce quicker decisions
fly and statistical reports. immediate managers take this by providing data several times
The regular benefits of quick report and look into the red and faster.
and accurate output being critical amber colors and take appropriate Another major benefit of BI is in
in decision-making definitely business actions—leading to faster terms of the quality of decisions
The company accrues. Cost savings are the decisions,” he added. arising out of analytical reports,
default benefits from this imple- trend analysis and statistical analy-
started small and mentation. However, besides that, Faster time to market and sis. Given these benefits it can be
the usage grew using the report iteratively and tak- response surmised that the investment
ing learning’s from the trends of 1KEY BI had helped to cut down- has been paid for several times
in phases these reports, the businesses were time. Being in the financial market over.
in a position to provide better serv- where information is critical and
ice and focus to clients that mat- keeps changing every few seconds/ IT infrastructure running 1KEY
tered. Pereira explained now busi- minutes, reports that took at least a Edelweiss Capital has bought
ness users can do slicing and dicing couple of hours can be done in sec- enterprise-wide license for unlimit-
of information with dynamic and onds. “Therefore, the faster you get ed user of 1KEY Agile BI Suite,
cube reports. Revenue MIS reports your information, the better and which includes many modules and
required by the top management faster decisions you can make,” it uses generic Intel Xeon-based
are sent on daily basis from 1KEY pointed out Pereira. Edelweiss gets servers that run Microsoft Windows
BI to take business decisions. “We automated MIS reports, where the Server 2003 and uses SQL Server
have done a programming in Avaya accuracy is better since the whole 2005 as database.
systems wherein all clients’ num- thing is completely systems driven.
bers are stored in it. Using 1KEY we He explained that each major akhtar.pasha@expressindia.com
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