EMPOWERING‘THE EMPOWERED’

ICICI Bank is using SAS to establish an Enterprisewide Business Intelligence Platform

ICICI Bank is India's second-largest bank with total assets of about USD 38.1 bn as on March 31, 2005. ICICI Bank has a network of about 560 branches and extension counters and over 1,900 ATMs. ICICI Bank offers a wide range of banking products and financial services  to corporate and retail customers through a variety of delivery channels and through its specialized subsidiaries and affiliates in the areas of investment banking, life and non-life insurance, venture capital and asset management. ICICI Bank also has an international banking group which caters to the cross border needs of clients and leverage on its domestic banking strengths to offer  products internationally. ICICI Bank currently has subsidiaries in the United Kingdom and Canada, branches in Singapore and Bahrain and representative offices in the United States, China, United Arab Emirates, Bangladesh and South Africa.

Over the last few years, ICICI Bank has taken rapid strides in developing new businesses in line with its proposition to offer complete financial services to both corporate and retail customers.  
                                                                
Going forward, ICICI Bank believes that their biggest challenge will be to continue innovating to improve market shares and maintain their competitive edge. According to Mr. K.V. Kamath, Managing Director & CEO, ICICI Bank, “In this endeavor, we will continue to benchmark with global best practices to ensure optimum utilization of our resources and the finest exposure to our work force. My vision is to develop ICICI Bank into an organization that is empowered by bright and talented individuals, working in teams and riding on the backbone of world class technology.”  
  
With this philosophy of driving enterprise intelligence across ICICI Bank, they were keen to implement an enterprise-wide reporting system that would empower synergistic reporting between applications supporting the same business and at the same time offer flexibility to cater to reporting needs of various business units. With business transactions growing exponentially, one of the ‘key’ parameters that the team at ICICI Bank was evaluating the solution on was ‘Scalability’ of the solution that can support the growing data in ICICI Bank. The Genesis of this opportunity to help ICICI Bank derive ‘single version of truth’ and then report the same through an enterprise-wide reporting system arose in the second half of year 2004. The various departments across ICICI Bank by then had gone ahead and purchased reporting systems to meet their respective needs.

In the existing Business Intelligent environment, it was difficult for the Bank to derive ‘Single Version of Truth’ as there were Multiple Reporting Systems that had become cumbersome to maintain. Also information dissemination across the enterprise was now being undertaken by the IT team, who were only engaged in responding to adhoc queries from the warehouse. Coupled with this, bandwidth issues (MIS over email), security concerns with enterprise data lying on desktops, and exponentially increasing data established a distinct need for a solution that can integrate all data sources across the enterprise, is user-friendly and above-all a scalable solution that can support the growing business needs of ICICI Bank. 
 
The SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform was an ideal fit in this business scenario, as it will empower the bank with the key cornerstones of SAS® 9: ‘Manageability’, ‘Interoperability’, ‘Scalability’ and ‘Usability’. 
 
The key departments which were involved in evaluating the solution that could empower them to make decisions based on enterprise intelligence were the Technology Management Group, and the Retail & Corporate Banking teams. 
 
The main business concerns which the IT Team was planning to address through an enterprise-wide solution were:
 - Support business if the growth in number of users exceeds the planned numbers
 - Integrate several applications that need to be integrated within the business
 - Security of the system and data 
 
 With SAS, the IT team was convinced that
 - The SAS Web-based solution would enable ICICI Bank to provide information access to all users
    across the enterprise
 - SAS scales upwards and outwards to address greater number of queries (scalability)
 - Interoperability! SAS can talk to all existing data sources, natively, and that it is open!
 - Security concerns can be addressed with SAS ‘Manageability’ - The SAS Management Console
   can be deployed as one point of control in setting up permissions 
 
The IT team at ICICI Bank was also keen to know if it would be possible for the SAS solution to report on Warehouse or Marts. This helped in broadening the ‘Scope’ with the introduction of SAS ETL Server for creation of marts. Also the vision of setting-up an enterprise-wide Business Intelligence Platform helped the team to establish a distinct need for SAS E-Miner. Also one single Enterprise BI Platform with a Centralized Metadata Management helped in broadening the vision for consolidating their existing BI environment and establishing an Enterprise Intelligence Platform. 
 
With prior experience of reporting through multiple reporting systems, the Business Users in the Retail and Corporate Banking arm of ICICI Bank had separate sets of concerns:
 - Migration of existing reports, Cubes
 - SAS User Interface not user friendly (WRV) 
 
Understanding the distinct reporting needs of different information users, SAS demonstrated ‘Enterprise Guide’ to the business users – one single application for Data Management, Data Analysis, OLAP Viewing, Scheduling reports and creation of stored process.  
 
To address issues related to migration and scalability, SAS suggested a PoC and involved both business as well as the IT users during the PoC. 
 
The Bank identified a complex Cognos cube – which had complex transformations in computation of moving averages, flow through buckets, delinquency periods. The Bank provided SAS with the raw data (flat file) from which the Cognos cube was created and also a Cognos idq which SAS exported into flat file.
 
SAS imported the data into SAS data sets using both the sources and built a cube in SAS using OLAP cube studio. In addition to this, SAS also validated the data by comparing the values in the Cognos cube with the SAS cube. 
 
It was impressive to record that SAS just took one third the time to build the cube (2 min as opposed to 6 min by Cognos); Cube Exploitation was sub-second response time and the entire migration of cube took four hours (including understanding the transforms and getting the raw data into place). 
 
 The success of the POC was the key turning point for SAS. The vision of consolidating the BI environment and setting up an enterprise-wide Business Intelligence Platform had been created. ICICI Bank selected SAS ETL Server, SAS Enterprise BI Server and SAS E-Miner to establish the requisite framework for deriving one version of truth and reporting through an enterprise-wide reporting system. 
 
Mr. Pravir Vohra, Chief Technology Officer, ICICI Bank rightly establishes the strategic outlook of ICICI Bank. According to Mr. Vohra, “Adoption of SAS in ICICI Bank is in line with our strategy to consolidate our Business Intelligence framework and establish an Enterprise-wide Business Intelligence Platform. With the SAS ETL Server it will now be possible for us to integrate our data sources across the enterprise. SAS Enterprise BI Server will empower our information users to have access to the requisite reports through an Enterprise-wide reporting system. Our partnership with SAS will go a long way in streamlining our BI Strategy.”