Case Studies: Financial Services

Vital Forsikring ASA, part of DnB NOR ASA, is Norway’s largest privately owned provider of pension and life insurance. Soon-to-be-implemented pension laws in Norway are expected to increase the number of new pension insurance subscribers. Anticipating the new legislation to take effect in January 2006, Vital wanted to be ready with convenient ways for customers to access its expanding pension product offerings. By using Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 and SQL Server™ 2005, programmers delivered a feature-rich pension application that provides better scalability and performance. Developers enjoyed increased productivity, and Vital is poised to meet the needs of hundreds of thousands of new individual and corporate pension insurance subscribers with a reliable, cost-effective solution.

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.

Starting in the late 1970s, the Brazilian São Paulo Stock Exchange (BOVESPA) ran its mission-critical applications on ever-larger, ever-more costly mainframe platforms. By the early 2000s, with daily trading volume growing by 50 percent each year, BOVESPA IT executives decided to evaluate their technology investments and infrastructure. Seeking a more flexible approach, they decided to migrate the entire operation to a Microsoft-based environment using Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 with Intel® Itanium® 2 and Xeon® servers and ultimately retire the mainframe. Based on early results, the decision was a wise one. BOVESPA is enjoying higher performance, stability, and security and a lower total cost of ownership. The institution is also helping brokers and dealers become more productive, thereby facilitating access to securities trading by individuals and organizations of all sizes worldwide.

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.