4-page Case Study - Posted 2/16/2007

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The Banca Marche Group

New Information System Increases Efficiency and Helps Double Profits at Italian Bank

With approximately 300 branches throughout Italy’s five central regions, the Banca Marche Group has more than 450,000 customers and 2,900 employees. The growth of the group over the last few years has added pressure to employees’ daily lives and led management to standardise and improve control of the bank’s information assets. After a careful assessment of the solutions available on the market, the group chose the powerful combination of Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 and Intel® Itanium® 2 processor-based servers. The new platform has increased employees’ productivity and helped the group realise a 75 per cent cut in production costs for management reports and a 90 per cent reduction in average distribution times. In addition, the lower costs have played a key role in the company doubling net profits.

Situation

With net profits doubling between 2004 and 2005, a growing number of branches, and increasing customer transactions, the Banca Marche Group needed to upgrade its services and standardise a large volume of information. To do this, the group needed to improve the server platform, create a single certified database to supply structured information to senior management, and distribute new reference models across all corporate sectors. Previously, the data was extrapolated from different sources, often manually, with the risk that information about operating and strategic areas of the bank could be widely interpreted.

Corrado Faletti, Central Manager for IT Systems and Organisation, Banca Marche Group, says: “A working group collected and analysed the requirements of internal users for six months. We sought to specify the best method to correlate, standardise, and increase the value of the various data. In doing so, we wanted to reduce fragmentation of information across departments and systems, with a view to improving the management models and user productivity during data research, analysis, and validation.”

Solution

Under Faletti’s management, the group decided to deploy a single data warehouse, offering a multidimensional analysis and reporting infrastructure, as well as a new strategic Bank Data Warehouse (BDW). After a careful examination of the options available, Banca Marche Group chose to implement Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005—owing to its reliability, security, scalability, and integration with the Microsoft Office system at the bank.

The new Microsoft platform—powered by Intel® Itanium® 2 processor-based servers— was chosen after comparative analysis with other solutions on the market on the basis of cost, usability, speed, and volume of data processed. The Itanium® 2 architecture and SQL Server 2005 platform, under a specific Banca Marche application environment, performed 20 per cent better than other competitors. The Intel® architecture was also found to be much more cost effective than a reduced instruction set computer (RISC)- based platform.

With SQL Server 2005 and Intel® Itanium® 2 processors at its heart, the new solution offers comprehensive business intelligence. with univocal, homogeneous, and centralised management across the group. Through an updated reference dictionary and new data mining logics, the single BDW also standardises operations for:

• Operative marketing
• Strategic planning
• Management control
• Human resource planning
• Auditing and accounting

Furthermore, the Itanium® 2 architecture’s core data-intensive computing abilities mean the large volumes of data and transactions managed by the bank can be processed much more quickly and accurately. In practice, this means all the strategic, business, and compliance requirements of the bank are met.

At the same time as the single BDW, the group’s commercial workstation was created and distributed to all branches—again, using SQL Server 2005 running on an Itanium® 2 micro architecture. The new workstation is a strategic customer relationship management (CRM) instrument capable of displaying the business opportunities to be offered to every customer type—affluent, mass market, private, corporate, or small business—rapidly and flexibly.

Benefits

Two Weeks’ Work Completed in One Afternoon
The distribution and profiling of reports to central management has significantly improved. This is due to the rich functionality of SQL Server 2005, especially Reporting Services, and the high performance of Intel® technology in mission-critical environments. The new platform has increased employees’productivity and helped the group realise an 80 per cent saving in average performance times, a 75 per cent cut in production costs, and a 90 per cent reduction in average distribution times.

Faletti says: “Before SQL Server 2005, we spent approximately 15 working days obtaining the information requested. Today, we can gather the data required in one afternoon, which allows us to make better business decisions faster.”

Before SQL Server 2005, we spent approximately 15 working days obtaining the information requested. Today, we manage to obtain the data required in a maximum of one afternoon. Corrado Faletti, Central Manager for IT Systems and Organisation, Banca Marche Group

The bank has doubled its profits by reducing costs, as opposed to selling off properties, making capital gains on rates, or raising charges beyond the market standard. Faletti says: “This result is possible due to the use and implementation of instruments such as SQL Server 2005 and Intel® Itanium® processors, an extremely competitive platform in terms of costs, development times, facility, and flexibility.”

Greater Flexibility Offers Customers Improved Service
The flexibility of the combined Microsoft and Intel® architecture proved fundamental for the success of the commercial workstation, which, according to Faletti, “represents the bank’s pride and joy.” Offering customers unprecedented transparency and speed of service, the workstation has helped the bank grow its customer base while improving the service its employees provide.

Faletti explains: “Before introducing the workstation, a branch operator typically succeeded in efficiently managing 30 to 40 of the 350 customers they were looking after. Now, each operator succeeds in managing all 350 of them in an optimum manner. Furthermore, since the commercial workstation and the Bank Data Warehouse were deployed, we have seen a significant increase in new current accounts.”

New Infrastructure Opens Pathway to Future Change
The success of the new SQL Server 2005 and Itanium® 2-based platform has helped the group to reassess its existing practices. Faletti says: “We chose to leave the factory model behind, and we now see ourselves as a testing laboratory, which involves processes, people, skills, and resources with the aim of achieving the maximum results from technology and organisational improvements. The main value of SQL Server 2005 powered by Itanium® 2 processor-based servers within the bank is having a unified structure in accordance with shared and innovative functional models.”

Partners Work Together for Continued Innovation
Banca Marche is developing new applications in the open standard world and progressively abandoning mainframe technology. “One of our reference platforms is the Microsoft .NET Framework, on which the Commercial Workstation operates,” explains Faletti. “We plan to develop a financial control system on the .NET Framework, and we chose this line of development because we believe that this platform is best suited to our experimental spirit.”

This choice is also reinforced by the positive opinion of the continued cooperation between Microsoft and Banca Marche. “It is not just a question of purchasing products, but establishing a relationship of trust with the supplier,” says Faletti. “We could say that our choice was not so much for SQL Server 2005, but for Microsoft and Intel®, which have always worked with integrity and reliability to generate better business decisions by enabling the highest productivity on mission-critical applications.”

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (nasdaq ‘MSFT’) is the worldwide leader in software for personal computers and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software — any time, any place, and on any device.

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