BusinessObjects: Analytics solutions for the financial industry

An extremely extensive IT infrastructure

The financial industry entities, i.e. banks, insurance companies, leasing institutions, investment fund companies, brokerage houses, are often among the country’s largest enterprises. In these huge companies, the IT issues play a special role. In the financial services industry, the computerization is becoming a key tool in the fight for customers and market share – it is enough to say that more than half of the Polish population has access to internet banking. Additionally, a distinguishing feature of the industry is the fact that due to the required stability of IT solutions and specific legal conditions it is necessary to preserve and maintain the old parts of the systems, which often operate in parallel with their newer counterparts. The provision of new services and offering new products result in adding new software components to the existing landscape on a continuous basis.

The ever increasing complexity of the IT infrastructure not only raises its maintenance costs, but also significantly hinders access to information. That is why the financial industry needs analytical applications that are able to coherently combine data from different systems, and that have a user-friendly interface and powerful capabilities of searching, presenting and inferring based on available data.

BI solutions from SAP

In recent years, SAP AG has intensified its development efforts in the field of analytics solutions. According to the “2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics platform" report, it has recently returned proudly to the group of leaders. This was a result of several years of investments in the integration of existing solutions and creation of entirely new Business Intelligence products.

A set of applications included in the SAP BusinessObjects BI Reporting Suite, widely used in financial institutions, was completely remodeled. Many old products that had not been developed for some time were replaced by completely new ones that redefine the concept of ergonomics and functionality. Additionally, other complementary applications were developed, providing end users with a very extensive analytics platform. Further herein, we will briefly present its most important elements.

Universe of objects and data federation

Since the 4.0 release of SAP BusinessObjects BI tools, a basic analytical package has been extended to include an important functionality of relational linking of data (data federation) from various sources into a single logical data area (the so-called universe of objects). This allows you to quickly and easily build information areas that link data from various source systems through dependencies, and present these data for reporting tools. With this approach, the business user does not need to know the intricacies of the relationships of tables from different databases in order to create analyses. He does not need to know that some information comes, for example, from the old banking system A, and another part of the information comes from the new system B or C. For the user, reporting means the access to the business data area and the selection of appropriate measures and analytical indicators.

Basic analytical tools

A simplified portfolio of SAP BusinessObjects BI reporting tools allows you to better address the needs of business users. The most important analytics products of the latest release of the SAP analytical system are successively presented below.

Formatted reporting

For many years, SAP Crystal Reports has been an industry standard in the area of static reports or reports “for printing”. This solution is one of the basic SAP BI tools from the SAP company and although it is often replaced with other products, it still fulfills its role as a universal tool that enables you to display relevant data on the screen and print them.

SAP Design Studio is a completely new proposal in the portfolio of SAP reporting solutions. It allows you to create formatted reports displayed in a modern interface based on the HTML5 technology (to be reproduced both on computers and mobile devices). The applications prepared in this tool are not just reports – these are analytical applications or managerial dashboards that allow you to perform dynamic actions on the data in the course of reporting. SAP Design Studio allows for nesting of other SAP analytics solutions (e.g. prepared using SAP Lumira). The tool can be particularly useful for preparing managerial dashboards for middle and senior management, which clearly present the most important business indicators and allow you to easily move to detailed analyses.

Employee self-service

SAP Web Intelligence is still an unsurpassed tool in the area of employee self-service and creation of ad hoc reports by business users. This product allows you to build a complex report consisting of tabular and graphical elements (e.g. charts) within a few minutes in a user-friendly interface accessible through a Web browser. The report can be, of course, shared on the BI platform, sent as a PDF or exported to an MS Excel workbook. In many companies, this is a basic tool that covers the demand for both formatted reports and quickly built temporary business analyses. In the financial industry, where you often need to create ad-hoc analyses, it is almost an indispensable tool.

Data mining and visualization of relationships between data

The product which combines the user-friendly interface of MS Excel with the possibility of data mining is SAP Analysis for Office. This tool allows for reporting of data from OLAP cubes in a manner reminiscent of pivot tables. In addition, tabular data can be combined with various charts available in MS Excel or PowerPoint. For those who like to work with workbooks of electronic worksheets, Analysis for Office can be a tool of first choice.

Data visualization is best done using SAP Lumira. This product allows you to explore the dependencies inherent in the data and to present them in a form intelligible to others. It can be used, for example, to quickly find the cause of the decline in sales of a particular service, but also to prepare a presentation explaining the conclusions drawn. The user-friendly interface allows you to use the product after just a few minutes from the first contact. The integration with SAP Design Studio lets you use Lumira as a tool for preparing elements nested in the analytical applications and managerial dashboards.

Complementary SAP Business Intelligence tools

In the analytics solutions, performance plays a special role. User-friendly presentation interfaces are not sufficient to report the data included in large data sets often dispersed in different systems. What is needed is an “engine" that will handle user requests in real or “almost real" time and will not put a load on domain-specific systems.

The SAP company is a creator of SAP HANA, an innovative in-memory database. SAP HANA is a comprehensive platform for in-memory processing with unprecedented performance. In a complex financial company with terabytes of data and dozens of IT systems, it can be used as an analytic data warehouse that integrates information from various sources and presents it to analytical applications in real time.

In complex systems for cleaning and ensuring the consistency of data from different sources, it may be necessary to use data processing tools (the so-called ETL tools). SAP AG has in its portfolio one of the best ETL solutions in the industry – SAP Data Services. In a user-friendly graphical interface of this solution, you can model data flows and transformations and monitor data processing in accordance with a pre-defined schedule.

A business advantage is gained by those companies that not only analyze past events, but actively try to predict the future and react quickly to any ongoing events that can change the future. Prediction is one of the fastest growing components of SAP Business Intelligence solutions. In the financial industry, even small changes in markets or changes in customer preferences can have significant pecuniary effects.

The combination of SAP’s own experience and best practices of other companies (Knox) allowed for the creation of SAP Predictive Analytics. This powerful and versatile tool can be used to make quick ad-hoc predictions using in-memory processing or to generate regular predictive procedures that will be, for example, included in the creditworthiness assessment procedures or procedures for grouping insurance customers. A variety of tools can be used to predict the future – from statistical analyses through data mining tools such as clustering, to heuristic analyses and neural networks. In addition, the prediction results can be presented not only in tabular form, but they can be instantly visualized using the same visualization tool that was used in SAP Lumira, the tool that has been already discussed.

Summary

SAP AG, which a few years ago neglected a little the Business Intelligence market, has prepared a refreshed portfolio of modern BI products covering a wide range of potential needs of customers. These tools can not only work well with other SAP products, but they fully show their capabilities in a complex IT environment, which is a domain of the financial industry. BI solutions can be divided into groups, depending on the typical applications for which they are used, which facilitates the selection of the right tool to achieve a specific business goal. The division of products for the business user is shown in the table.

All of the above applications are connected with a common interface of SAP LaunchPad, a reporting portal that ensures consistent management of authorizations, access to reports, distribution of information and switching from one analytics tool using another.

In addition, the SAP company has provided a platform for the preparation of more complex Business Intelligence scenarios. SAP HANA, the industry’s most modern in-memory processing platform, allows for both fast data writing, reading, with on-the-fly data aggregation, and ultra-fast operations on data. SAP tools for data replication in real time can fill an analytical warehouse with data from different sources (e.g. different databases) at the same time when these data appear in the source systems. An advanced ETL product – SAP Data Services allows you to manage even complex operations of information cleaning and transfer.

The full portfolio of SAP BI systems allows for addressing even the most complex analytical challenges. In manufacturing companies or simpler service enterprises, only a small part of capabilities of SAP tools is usually used. In the financial sector, in which the complex IT infrastructure requires industry-leading analytics solutions, SAP BI products can provide a new quality, meeting business needs both in terms of the offered features and performance, and the user-friendly interface.