Banking and Financial Services

Financial services leaders choose Cognos:

• Nine of the top 10 banks in the U.S. and in Europe use Cognos.
• Six of the top 10 insurance companies in the world.
• Seven of the top 10 insurance companies in the US choose Cognos.

These industry leaders, and over 1,000 other banks, insurance companies, and financial services institutions use Cognos software to:

• Increase customer, product, and channel profitability.
• Manage and reduce risk.
• Address compliance issues.
• Improve the predictability of financial performance.

Benefits and Value

Cognos integrated performance management software and services deliver value to the world's largest financial services companies.

Reporting, analysis, and business intelligence

• Leverage your existing data investment to identify, report on, and analyze costs of trade, staff performance, risk management, branch profitability, loan performance, and customer profitability.
• Aggregate risk (credit, operational, market, country) data from multiple silos, diverse business lines, all regions, and across the organization to deliver enterprise risk reporting.
• Meet the information needs of all users with a flexible, user-friendly means to deliver the right information in the right way: whether managed reports, dashboards, scorecards, online analysis, or self-service reporting and queries.
• Extend extranet capabilities to customers, partners, brokers, and suppliers.

Planning, forecasting, and consolidation

• Augment or replace cumbersome spreadsheet-based systems with flexible, connected planning software.
• Enable driver-based planning.
• Reduce consolidation, close, and reporting cycles by days or weeks
• Manage multiple reporting and consolidation standards such as IAS and U.S.-based GAAP; intercompany elimination and reconciliation; multicurrency translation; complex ownership calculations, and financial consolidation rules.
• Conduct what-if scenarios for different revenue projections or changes in business lines.

 Scorecarding

• Improve efficiency of front, middle, and back-end functions by setting targets and Scorecarding the processes.
• Communicate priorities and key metrics across your financial services organization, answering at any time the key question: Are we making progress on the things that must be done?
• Increase transparency and accountability by clearly identifying the status of key metrics for employees, boards, regulatory bodies, and other stakeholders.

Retail banking

Cognos delivers competitive advantage to the world's leading retail banks in these areas:

Customer profitability

• Identify and attract profitable new customers through improved marketing.
• Improve customer retention and customer service with household, customer, and account reporting and analysis.
• Improve branch performance using branch analysis, reporting, and strategic planning.

Risk management

• Minimize credit risk with a complete picture of exposures.
• Allow enterprise risk management with consolidated risk analysis and reporting across all risks and businesses.
• Meet regulatory requirements such as Basel II with a transparent view of your risk information.

Organizational performance

• Align operational decisions with strategy by combining strategic planning, timely monitoring, and deep analytical capabilities.
• Communicate priorities and key metrics enterprise-wide with cascading scorecards.
• Engage front-line managers with the planning process.
• Get everyone operating from a single version of the truth.

Insurance

Cognos delivers competitive advantage to the global leaders in insurance:

Reduce costs and increase efficiency

• Make more timely decisions by getting vital information faster.
• Create a self-service reporting environment, reducing the demand on IT.
• Gain deeper insight into sales with extensive analysis and reporting.

Care for customers

• Deliver self-service, interactive claims information for customers.
• Enable greater transparency into claims.
• Alert customers on pre-set performance indicators.

Manage business performance

• Align decisions with strategy and data by combining strategic planning, timely monitoring, and deep analytical capabilities.
• Communicate priorities enterprise-wide with cascading scorecards.
• Engage front-line managers with the planning process.
• Get everyone operating from a single version of the truth.

Investment Banking

Cognos delivers competitive advantage to the global leaders in investment banking

Cognos helps investment banks:

Improve brokerage efficiency

• Identify, report on, and analyze bottlenecks and cost excesses throughout trade execution—from the dealing room to settlement and allocation.
• Improve efficiency of front, middle, and back-end functions by scorecarding processes by trade type, instrument, market, and asset classes.
• More accurately manage trade performance and total cost of trade through timely analysis.
• Quantify the effectiveness of brokers, asset managers, partners, and brokerage services provided using analysis and reporting.

Increase and sustain profit
Investment banks can use industry-leading analysis, reporting, planning and scorecarding from Cognos to manage all areas of profitability, including:

• Cost of trade and indirect cost allocation.
• Demonstrating quality of execution.
• Staff performance.
• Risk management and compliance obligations.
• Product and service visibility and updates.

Address corporate governance requirements
Sarbanes-Oxley, the Myners Report, and the U.S. Patriot Act all demand greater control and visibility. With Cognos investment banks can:

• Aggregate risk (credit, operational, market, country) data from multiple silos, diverse business lines, all regions, and across the organization to deliver enterprise risk reporting.
• Analyze enterprise risk patterns, model risk events, and proactively alert managers and senior executives to pre-determined risk events or breeches.
• Respond to external key influencers, such as rating agencies, to ensure a lower cost of capital by displaying in-depth analysis.

Leverage research services
Investment banks must know how much trading revenue research services generate and be able to measure it against soft and bundled services packages.

With Cognos you can:

• Correlate, report, and analyze the association between research services provided and the brokerage they generate.
• Measure and assess the profits generated by research and events.
• Model alternative mechanisms and new business models to finance the research function, or subsidize the production costs.
• Report and display research effectiveness to clients.