Case Studies: Financial Services

Garanti Bank, one of the largest private banks in Turkey with assets of U.S.$21.7 billion, has earned numerous industry awards for its technological innovations, including being named “Turkey’s Best Internet Bank” for the past five years. To reduce processing loads on its mainframe, Garanti has steadily improved existing internal applications and designed its new applications to run on Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 database software. In 2005, the bank became an early adopter and upgraded to the new SQL Server 2005, running on Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 Enterprise Edition. Bank management wanted to take advantage of a number of new features in the new system to, among other things, eliminate scheduled offline time for database re-indexing and to gain near real-time reporting. Garanti's testing has shown SQL Server 2005 to be 270 percent faster in transaction processing than SQL Server 2000.

Fortis is an international provider of banking and insurance services. The company ranks among Europe’s top 20 financial institutions, with a market capitalisation of more than €40 billion (U.S.$53 billion), operations in 50 countries, and more than 60,000 employees. To support the company’s growth strategy, managers needed improved insight into the performance of various lines of business and a better understanding of performance drivers. With these goals in mind, Fortis deployed a new performance management system based on Microsoft® technologies. The system has automated time-consuming data gathering tasks, freed employees to focus on value-added analysis, and increased transparency on reported key performance indicators. Reports, based on timely, accurate management data, help managers make the best business decisions and increase responsiveness to changing market trends.

Credit Suisse, based in Zurich, Switzerland, provides investment banking, private banking, and asset management services to clients in more than 50 countries. Because its shares are traded on the New York Stock Exchange, the company had to comply with regulations specifying internal controls introduced by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) Section 404. With more than 45,000 employees working around the world, Credit Suisse needed a SOX 404 compliance solution that was scalable and that could integrate with its line of business operations. Credit Suisse developed a SOX 404 compliance application based on Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 database and accessed across the Web through a portal supported by Microsoft Office SharePoint® Services. The solution was developed using Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 and the Microsoft .NET Framework.

Sasfin Bank is a South African bank providing financial services for entrepreneurs. It wanted to create a single view of the customer that would help provide information required for risk analysis, compliance with Basel II regulation, and for making insightful business decisions. To do this, Sasfin took on a top challenge in the banking industry: connecting disparate systems across the bank. To better manage customer information and proactively comply with regulation, Sasfin implemented an enterprise customer management content and business intelligence solution based on the 2007 Microsoft® Office system, including XML integration capabilities and file format. Sasfin anticipates an 80 percent increase in the amount of customer data available for required fields for compliance reports. In addition, Sasfin expects to eliminate redundant data entry and improve customer satisfaction.

Facing massive data growth, longer processing times, and hardware reaching the end of its useful life, Bank Leu, a leading Swiss private bank, needed to upgrade or replace its management accounting system. To enable this highly complex system to keep up with the bank’s expanding business, Bank Leu and Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Trivadis built a solution based on Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) and using Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005. The solution is expected to increase the productivity of management accountants by up to 40 percent, enabling the bank to deliver more insight to users, while reducing data complexity. The solution is only half as expensive as comparable alternatives and requires merely 20 percent of the custom code that would have been needed without SQL Server 2005.