Alpha Bank Weathers Greek Financial Crisis With Information Builders
Company Size
1,000+
Region
- Europe
Country
- Greece
Product
- WebFOCUS
- iWay DataMigrator
Tech Stack
- Oracle
- Microsoft Access
- Microsoft Excel
- Microsoft Visual Basic
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Customer Satisfaction
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
Applicable Industries
- Finance & Insurance
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Predictive Quality Analytics
- Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
Services
- Data Science Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Alpha Bank is one of the largest banks in Greece with more than 1,000 branches and subsidiaries in nine countries. The bank maintains an active presence in Cyprus, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Ukraine, Albania, FYROM, and the UK. Alpha Bank's strategy focuses on high-margin sectors with promising growth prospects. This includes retail banking in Greece, with an emphasis on loans to individuals and small businesses. As the global economic downturn took hold, the banking sector was hit especially hard and Alpha Bank found itself particularly vulnerable. It needed to retain liquidity and preserve good banking relationships with its largest customers, even as it responded to daily requests from regulators at the Central Bank of Greece.
The Challenge
Alpha Bank, one of the largest financial services companies in Greece, found itself vulnerable during the global economic downturn. The bank needed to retain liquidity and preserve good banking relationships with its largest customers, while also responding to daily requests from regulators at the Central Bank of Greece. However, the MIS department was spending an inordinate amount of time accessing information and generating reports using Microsoft Access and Excel. The manual system for creating reports involved consolidating information from 40 different information systems into Microsoft Access databases, and then creating ad hoc reports and financial statements. This process was time-consuming and inefficient, with the team spending more time looking for data rather than gaining insights.
The Solution
Alpha Bank employed the Information Builders WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) platform to access accurate real-time information instantly. The bank created a data mart of consolidated information, loaded each night by iWay Software’s DataMigrator, supplying daily insight to top managers, branch officers, and regulators. The data mart contains information about investments, mortgages, credit cards, consumer loans, leasing packages, insurance, checking accounts, savings accounts and other bank products. It also records daily income from customers, products, business units, branches, and specific accounts throughout Alpha Bank’s nine-country territory. Information Builders supplied an end-to-end solution to merge all of this information into one consolidated database, and then developed a way to access, manage, and analyze that information.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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