Cognos has launched a new financial services performance solution designed to help retail banks drive greater branch profitability through more effective customer segment and product-level planning, analysis and reporting. The solution leverages Cognos Planning and Business Intelligence applications as well as taking information from Acorn System's activity based costing system.
The new Cognos Branch Performance Blueprint was developed to help retail banks perform detailed top-down and branch-up revenue and expense planning to ensure organisation-wide alignment with strategic objectives. The solution, says Cognos, extends the planning process beyond the finance department to the branch network, enabling managers to drive profitability planning, analysis and reporting at the product and customer segment levels.
"Planning is about more than developing a budget. Innovative banks are looking to develop more adaptive processes for planning and forecasting that are based on key business performance drivers, enabling changes based on underlying business activity," said Mitch Max, managing partner for The Performax Group, and director of financial services for the Beyond Budgeting Round Table. "Decentralised banks also require an efficient means of linking central operations costs to branch-level business activity. By linking accurate cost information to adaptive planning and performance management, the Cognos Branch Performance Blueprint delivers an integrated capability that leading banks have been seeking."
To ensure profitability plan accuracy, all data is delivered through Acorn System's Profit Analyser, which uniquely assigns general ledger costs and resources through business processes to precisely determine the baseline cost and profitability of individual customers, segments, channels, branches, products and even transactions, based on historical performance. With greater confidence in these numbers, Cognos says branch managers can spend less time on calculations, focusing on executing initiatives and improving performance.
"Some of the world's largest financial service institutions, including retail banks, utilise Acorn's solution for a sustained, enterprise view of their business performance which is both financially and operationally validated," said Chris D. Fraga, chief strategy officer at Acorn Systems, Inc. "In addition to knowing historically where they are making and losing money across their business, retail banks want to leverage this foundation of insight to more effectively plan to drive future performance. The integration of Acorn's accurate content with Cognos Planning and BI combines all the right ingredients to enable a retail bank to achieve a past, present and future view of their business in order to drive increased profits and shareholder value."
"Branch performance is at the very core of retail banking success. Aligning branch operations with the bank's overall plans and objectives is critical for growth and solidifying customer loyalty," said Laurence Trigwell, senior director of financial services solutions at Cognos. "Our Cognos Branch Performance Blueprint provides both world-class BI and high-participation planning, helping banks achieve consistent operating performance through collaborative, real-time planning, forecasting, analysis and reporting. This inevitably leads to increased revenues, higher profits and a stronger customer experience and corporate brand."
