Case Studies: Financial Services

ASB Bank, a wholly owned subsidiary of Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), has a long history of innovative products, services, and operational procedures. When its parent organization decided to apply for an advanced level of accreditation for the international Basel II risk management accord, ASB needed to quickly assemble a packet of its own risk management information, processes, and policies to provide to CBA, as well as create a process for submitting periodic updates. To meet these requirements, ASB built a Basel II risk management data mart on Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition. Using the new features and technologies in SQL Server 2005, the bank was able to meet the requirements in less than nine months, ensure the integrity of business processes and data, reduce operational losses, lower funding costs, enhance its existing risk framework, and reduce hands-on management.

PREMIER Bankcard, LLC (PREMIER) one of the largest VISA and MasterCard credit providers in the United States, needed to enhance scalability and performance for its business intelligence (BI) data warehouse and online transaction processing (OLTP) databases. “BI began as an area of research for us, but has become absolutely mission critical,” says Dan Zerfas, Vice President of Software Development at PREMIER. The company enhanced its BI infrastructure by upgrading its 10-terabyte data warehouse to Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit), hosted on a server computer with 16 Intel® Itanium® 2 processors. PREMIER also upgraded its 1.5-terabyte OLTP database to the 64-bit version of SQL Server 2005. The upgraded deployments provide a better view of the business, enterprise-grade scalability, maintenance without scheduled downtime, and easier database management.

As a leading U.K. Building Society, Nationwide is required to comply with the Basel II Capital Accord, a new global regulation covering financial institutions. Fundamental to Basel II is the requirement to maintain a certain amount of money in reserve, termed capital adequacy, to cover unforeseen circumstances. To calculate the required capital adequacy, financial institutions must store and maintain records dating back at least seven years and covering every part of their organisation. Nationwide began work on a new data warehousing solution that would help it to meet the rigorous requirements of Basel II. With Microsoft support, it has created a data warehouse based on Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005, and employed Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 with the Microsoft Visual C#® development tool. The new architecture gives Nationwide the ability to develop and demonstrate solutions that will mean early compliance with Basel II. This will assist Nationwide to improve its risk management capabilities and potentially to benefit from reduced capital adequacy requirements.

"Microsoft SQL Server 2005 will give us a single, central repository for title data across the United States." Greg Christopher, Database Administrator, Fidelity National Information Services

Raymond James Financial needed to replace a data management solution that wasn’t keeping pace with the company’s rapid growth, including the planned deployment of 64-bit data warehouse applications for business intelligence. The company’s solution: the CommVault data backup and recovery solution running on 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 operating system software. By centralizing and automating the data management environment at Raymond James, the solution has made data backups 25 percent faster, data restorations 75 percent faster, and the entire process easier and more reliable. The changes made the company more productive, saving time and money. Technicians have more time to troubleshoot servers, follow up on exceptions to backup reports, and perform restores that would otherwise wait until the next day—further increasing reliability and availability.