EON Bank Group looks to SAS® for transparent, efficient financial management

EON Bank Group is one of Malaysia's most pioneering banking groups with a suite of innovative, first-of-its-kind financial products and services for both consumers and businesses. It continuously endeavors to be "The Preferred Bank" in Malaysia with best-in-class standards for delivery capabilities, customer experience and performance excellence. It has come even closer to its goal by reducing the time required to consolidate its budget from months to days, and improving its operational, reporting and compliance capabilities with SAS.

Greater line-of-business (LOB) visibility
EON Bank's previous manual-intensive financial consolidation processes left little time for performance analysis. EON Bank's management began to look for ways to streamline and automate financial reporting. Like many other banks, EON Bank had disparate legacy systems and hence, lacked the capability to drill down into more granular information to perform detailed line-of-business reporting. These discrete systems could no longer keep pace with the increasingly complex financial planning requirements of EON Bank, which were growing dynamically with each passing quarter.

The performance reports generated with Microsoft Office applications and spreadsheet consolidations were cumbersome, time-consuming and error-prone. As EON Bank's reporting increased in complexity - especially as the growing business churned out huge volumes of transactional data - more strategic decisions had to be made on tighter timelines.

Yap Yong Hoon , Head of Performance Measurement Management Reporting/Budget, says, "In order to build the foundation for a more competitive edge and sustainable growth, we needed to boost our business systems and IT elements for better business performance and at the same time, greater performance transparency all across EON Bank's lines of business."

"Realizing the importance of more transparent and efficient financial management in support of our group's rapid growth, we were happy to discover that SAS® Financial Management would not only enable better classification of processes but also accelerate planning and budgeting, as well as more robust business performance analysis," he added.

Analytics for proactive business decisions
Today, SAS delivers a single, highly flexible and integrated consolidation, reporting, planning and budgeting solution. As a result, EON Bank internal users are now able to access and integrate data automatically from disparate operational, budget, performance planning and cost accounting systems.

"SAS consolidates information from all systems across our various departments and subsidiaries to deliver a 360-degree view of our group's performance. It instantly transforms information into insights that help drive better-informed decision making," Yap says.

With SAS, EON Bank benefits from greater visibility of its performance across its lines of business, where it is able to identify the correlation between revenue and service costs at individual subsidiary levels.

"This helps us tremendously in trimming the time required for budget consolidation – literally from months to days, while helping us improve the credibility and integrity of information required to effectively grow EON Bank's business as a whole," Yap says.

Compliance at a higher level
The data transformation didn't end there. It also included continuous efforts to improve compliance to industry financial standards and statutory regulations, including the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) requirements.

As Yap points out, "EON Bank faced challenges when generating reports as they were implemented manually. Instead of spending unnecessary time sorting and filtering reports, we are now able to channel our resources towards analyzing our results for our management review."

Easing IFRS reporting
EON Bank also utilized its SAS Financial Management solution to automate compliance reporting. Yap says, "The use of SAS Financial Management has also shortened our reporting cycle significantly. It has helped us to trim down costs and efforts related to managing an ever-growing database of compliance data, formulating that data into relevant information and increasing flexibility in adapting to the changes in accounting rules."

"Today, we can ask for on-demand [real-time], yet reliable reports without any delay. Our management now has the luxury of diagnosing compliance issues with the advantage of making informed decisions at a much quicker pace. The substantial time saved has allowed users to focus more on analysis tasks. SAS's solution has significantly strengthened the internal team in terms of our ability to provide timely reporting that complies with statutory regulations. Users can see the results of data changes instantaneously and they no longer need to go through the complicated process of manual reports hence, resulting in significant cost savings."

Implementation satisfaction
SAS helped EON Bank Group:

• Automate its budgeting process.
• Incorporate LOB reporting to tie budgets to performance metrics.
• Analyze potential outcomes based on different scenarios.
• Consolidate data in a usable, easy-to-understand format.
• Make reports accessible via a portal, with the ability to drill down to details.
• Measure and track LOB performance in a timely manner.

Yap ends by saying, "We are pleased to note the positive results from our implementation of SAS Financial Management. The team from SAS has demonstrated their professional support and dedication in taking us through this journey so far and we are currently exploring the possible expansion of the SAS software into our business units' detailed budgeting process to enable more extensive analysis."

The results illustrated in this article are specific to the particular situations, business models, data input, and computing environments described herein. Each SAS customer’s experience is unique based on business and technical variables and all statements must be considered non-typical. Actual savings, results, and performance characteristics will vary depending on individual customer configurations and conditions. SAS does not guarantee or represent that every customer will achieve similar results. The only warranties for SAS products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements in the written agreement for such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Customers have shared their successes with SAS as part of an agreed-upon contractual exchange or project success summarization following a successful implementation of SAS software. Brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.

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