Case Studies: Financial Services

DenizBank, one of the largest private banks in Turkey, needed to find a more flexible infrastructure for its core banking to make it easier to integrate and deploy new solutions to help it keep pace with its rapid growth. The bank is replacing its old core banking platform, which was based on UNIX and the ADABAS database, with a new solution that uses Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 as the database and Microsoft development tools, including the Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0. The company has found it significantly easier to create new banking applications since moving to SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) and the new development environment. The solution has given the bank a unified banking environment and the agility it needs to quickly develop new applications to respond to market opportunities. DenizBank plans to use SQL Server 2005 Database Mirroring to enhance high availability of its data.

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.

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.