YES BANK's BI Kaleidoscope

YES BANK lived up to the statement, ‘Turning problems into opportunities’ during the recession with its in-house Business Intelligence (BI) solution. The bank was looking for a BI solution but budgetary constraints but the economic crunch, did not allow the bank this luxury. Not being defeated, it decided to design a BI solution on its own!

In 2009, the YES BANK decided to increase the growth momentum by progressing to the next level. BI was a critical contributor to the growth trajectory, as per the Bank’s focus. In a highly competitive banking industry, thorough understanding of the customer, his/her specific requirements and behavioral patterns are critical for customer acquisition, retention and cross selling of products. Hence, the need for sound BI was imperative.

Surendra Shetty, Chief Technology Officer - Banking Solutions and Group Executive Vice President, YES BANK was mandated to head this project. His team evaluated some key products; however, all BI products available in the market were extremely uneconomical with significantly high implementation costs. These concerns led to the development of Kaleidoscope - YES BANK’s zero cost in-house BI Solution.

Before we delve into Kaleidoscope, it’s important to have a retrospective look of the hassles faced by the bank due to the absence of a dedicated BI solution.

Stop Gap Arrangement of Discreet MISs

YES BANK postponed the adoption of BI in 2004, and handled the BI requirements in a way, where the respective departments pulled out data from their systems and forwarded it to the concerned stakeholders. More than 250 reports were generated using this data on a daily basis. The source of this information was from a variety of systems with their independent database. This resulted in inconsistencies, in terms of different data on the same topic with the established departments. Thus, there was a need for a solution, which would bring uniformity in data and subsequently all the stakeholders on the same page.

The second challenge was the need for dedicated staff, to maintain and process the required MIS data, on a daily basis. Every department had a dedicated group of people to convert the raw data into MIS, which was then passed on to the top management or the branch managers. The drawback of this system was that even after completing the task, the users faced a delayed report generation and delivery. As a result, there was an indefinite delay in the generation of reports, which ultimately had a negative impact on business processes. When the information was finally available for ‘actionable’ usage, it still had incomplete data. Every user could draw an independent interpretation of the data.

Information Security risk was the third challenge. As the entire data was available on the FTP site, anyone could access the raw data. In addition, the final consolidated reports for all bank branches were sent through e-mails. The distribution of reports on emails was also an Information security hazard. All recipients could see information pertaining to other recipients.

Analysing the Kaleidoscope

Given the critical task of overcoming these challenges, the Bank initiated Kaleidoscope. The technical team at YES BANK started documenting the BI solution that the Bank was looking for. It was divided into four phases.

In the first phase it visualised the possibility of extracting information from multiple MISs. It also wanted the solution to have a role-based access feature. It had to be actionable in nature and help the teams take productive decisions, on the basis of the intelligence provided. The second phase was to interlink the BI and BPM solution. The third included basic and flexible analytics. And finally, the last phase was to include advanced analytics whereby the users can play with various what-if scenarios to decide on the different kinds of product programs.

Working on the Bank’s BI

After receiving approval from the management, the evaluation of the open source product was initiated in July 2009. The technical team started the evaluation process for the Open Source platforms. The project was single handedly done within a time frame of eight months. The Bank selected a freeware - LogiXML as the reporting front end and integrated it with a custom built application.

The training for technical and business analysts was conducted through a Webinar. At first, the technology solutions team fed business data; however, later a dedicated Business Intelligence Center of Excellence (BICoE) team was instituted. All the data was verified by them before being finally fed by the technology and solutions BI team into the BI channel.

The team consisted of two outsourced executives with expertise on Database Structures and VB Scripting. There was also a programme manager who managed Program/Project Management. Also, every vertical in technology and solutions group had a technical and a business analyst, who also formed a part of this group, to develop and deliver reports to their respective internal customers.

Benefits of ‘Kaleidoscope’

Kaleidoscope offers an important benefit- Information Security. The information that is sent out to the employees is relevant, meaningful and accessible to the concerned department and employees. Earlier, the raw data and the MIS generated by the respective departments resulted in data inconsistencies between Fincon and Departmental MISs because the data was open for their interpretation; however, with using Kaleidoscope everyone receives common data.

Another benefit is the feature of providing a single view of the customer. The products bought by the customer from the bank appear in a single screen. As of now the feature is used for retail customers. Very soon the same feature will be utilised for corporate customers too.

The report generation process has become swift. Previously, the relevant data for MIS processing was ported on the production server that resulted in a delay of about eight to 24 hours in submitting the reports and the MISs to the departments, but with Kaleidoscope, the MISs are up at 9.00 AM on the following day.

The bank is already up and running with more than 200 reports ported online in less than a year. If YES BANK had opted for a propriety BI solution, the implementation period would have been anywhere between 18 to 24 months. There are more than 15 units within YES BANK that are already using this BI tool and average log-ins per day is more than 250 employees. The bank has also rolled out some operational risk reports, which are audited.

Considerably high productivity gains have been realised as a result of Kaleidoscope. With the current content that has been built up, productivity gains of approximately Rs.5 crores have already been realised. Nearly 7-8 Full Time Equivalents (FTEs) across the bank who were dedicated towards MIS generation were relieved from this responsibility, resulting in cost saving of nearly Rs.70 lakhs per annum.