TD Canada Trust
TD Canada Trust Invests in Microsoft SQL Server 2005
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Company Overview
TD Canada Trust knows as well as anyone the value of technology investment. Last year, the bank’s economic group released a report citing IT investments as a contributing factor to the lag in productivity between Ontario and US companies. Entitled Ontario: The Land of Opportunity, the report recommended, among other things, that Ontario companies increase technology spending or risk losing ground to competitors south of the border.
Business Challenge
TD Canada Trust found its retail risk analysts were spending too much time developing data reports, and assigned a special team to find a way to streamline the report generation process.
“Our team is tasked with developing data-based reports that help TD executives and credit centres identify issues before they become problems,” says Wilfredo Oliveros, manager, Risk Data Infrastructure & Reporting Retail Risk Management, TD Canada Trust. “Our team provides data that can help TD Canada Trust remain competitive against other major retail banks in the Canadian market.”
Under Oliveros’ direction, the team is tasked with finding a way to easily develop key risk reports, including two in-depth monthly reports for executives. The first report helps the bank measure credit approval ratios. The second report provides data on credit delinquents. The challenge with these and other reports is ensuring that they are developed quickly enough to reflect the current status of the business.
“The challenge is that it’s a very laborious process to pull the data together necessary to complete the reports. The data we need is stored in several sources across the company,” says Oliveros. “For large reports it typically takes us about five business days to complete the process, which means information can become dated by the time the executives receive the data. For new data dimensions, these can be pushed out to 14 days.”
To provide optimum value to TD Canada Trust, the retail risk management team realized it needed to find a speedier method for collecting risk data and compiling reports. The team wanted a complete technology solution that would reduce the amount of manual intervention necessary to develop the reports, and provide the computing power to develop reports as quickly as possible.
“We wanted to install a new solution that incorporated the powerful software and hardware components,” says Oliveros. “Our ideal solution would provide enough IT muscle to develop reports at a rate fast enough to reflect the current market situation for our executives, without requiring additions to the team.”
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Solution
After looking at competitive solutions, the TD team chose Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 for its 64-bit support, OLAP functionality and ability to handle large environments with low-maintenance requirements. Running on an HP ProLiant DL585 Opteron platform, the database would support the retail risk management team’s mission critical report generation process.
“I had worked with SQL Server 2000 for many years and knew it was a powerful database, capable of processing complex data,” says Oliveros. “But I was concerned that it would not provide the best support for 64-bit hardware. When the Microsoft team told me about 64-bit support in SQL Server 2005 and offered to help us develop our solution on a 64-bit server, I felt confident that we would be able to achieve our goals.”
The 64-bit Dual-Core technology was provided by Hewlett-Packard. The Quad socket HP ProLiant DL585 with 32 Gigabytes of RAM delivered the necessary CPU power with eight processors and a high throughput memory subsystem, as well as simplified deployment and management capabilities.
TD has a history of working with HP and felt confident that HP’s broad product portfolio and expertise would be able to address its objective to move to a 64-bit computing environment. The continuity and experience with HP hardware helped ensure that the migration to SQL Server 2005 would be completed rapidly, easily and successfully.
SQL Server 2005 is Microsoft’s next generation database technology. Among a host of benefits, SQL Server 2005 delivers improved data analysis and integration capabilities through features like SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP.)
SSIS is designed to make it easier for organizations to automate the transition of data into the database from disparate sources. OLAP is a well-known analytics technology that speeds the report building and generation process, but is typically only available as an add-on database feature.
“The enhanced features of SQL Server 2005 made it a very attractive product for this project,” says Oliveros. “The SSIS functionality allowed us to automate the process of transferring data into the database. We were also pleased that OLAP functionality was built into the database at no additional cost.”
Working with Microsoft, TD Canada Trust began building the solution on-top of existing back-end infrastructure, with minimal disruption to the department’s day-to-day activities. Built on an HP 64-bit platform, the solution was capable of processing 30 gigabytes of new data each month.
The team began installing the solution in July 2005 and will be completed before year-end.
Business Benefits
TD Canada Trust has found that the SQL Server-based solution delivers several key benefits, including speeding the report generation process and improving the bank’s ability to gain insight from risk data. The team has also found that the new solution requires a minimal time commitment to maintain and operate.
Overall, SQL Server 2005 has improved the data used to monitor risk exposure as well as minimized the steps necessary to gather risk data.
Speedy Report Generation
The main goal of this project for Oliveros and his team was to speed the report generation process. In early testing, SQL Server Integration Services has proven that it will significantly reduce the amount of manual intervention needed by the risk management team. Instead of manually collecting data from disparate sources and consolidating it in Excel spreadsheets, the team can now count on SQL Server 2005 to collect the data in a fraction of the time.
“Manually collecting data from each of the sources was the most time-consuming process for our team, often requiring weeks to complete for larger reports,” says Oliveros. “SSIS provides us with the capability to reduce this process significantly. We’ve pared down one key task that used to take up to ten hours, to only eight minutes.”
SQL Server 2005 will also allow the retail risk management team to develop ad hoc queries quickly.
Improved Business Insights
By speeding the report generation process through SQL Server 2005, TD Canada Trust will gain more insight from the risk data it collects. With more up-to-date reports, TD Canada Trust will have an increased ability to identify and respond to market trends.
“SQL Server 2005 has improved our ability to gain valuable and time-sensitive insight from the vast amount of risk data collected across TD,” says Oliveros. “The solution has also enabled the risk management team to provide more value as a supporting unit in the bank.”
The OLAP technology built into SQL Server 2005 enables the retail risk management team to sift through 30 gigabytes of data much faster than the previous system allowed. With the technology, the bank can now identify and act on key business trends.
Low Maintenance and High Flexibility
SQL Server 2005 will enable the retail risk management team to focus on report generation, instead of maintaining complex database and reporting technology. Unlike other databases on the market, SQL Server 2005 requires very little long-term maintenance to operate. The system can handle large environments with minimal maintenance required.
“Compared to other products, SQL Server operates at a high level without constant supervision from a DBA. The consistency of the solution allows our team to focus on delivering reports as quickly as possible to bank executives,” says Oliveros.
The solution also provides the bank with the flexibility to use a variety of front-end BI and analytics tools.
“One of the most appealing features of SQL Server 2005 is that users can easily plug-in a variety of BI applications to view reports and analyze data,” says Oliveros. “This type of open-environment provides us with the ability to consider many front-end systems as our needs evolve.”
Microsoft Windows Server System
Microsoft®Windows Server System is a comprehensive, integrated, and interoperable server infrastructure that helps reduce the complexity and costs of building, deploying, connecting, and operating agile business solutions. Windows Server System helps customers create new value for their business through the strategic use of their IT assets. With the Windows Server operating system as its foundation, Windows Server System delivers dependable infrastructure for data management and analysis; enterprise integration; customer, partner, and employee portals; business process automation; communications and collaboration; and core IT operations including security, deployment, and systems management.
For more information about Windows Server System, go to: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem
For More Information
Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales. For more information about TD Canada Trust products and services, call 1-866-222-3456 or visit the Web site at: www.tdcanadatrust.com
