Project with Largest Scale: State Bank of India's - Business Intelligence Solution

There are 13 crore customers who bank with State bank of India. The bank has presence in 32 countries and has over 13,800 branches, and there are 5 associate banks as well, which take up the total number of branches served to 18,000. The bank has a very complex organizational structure comprising of 14 circles for retail and specialized business units for corporate business, small and medium business, rural business, personal banking business, treasury and international business. The business data of SBI spreads over several domestic and international source systems like Core Banking, Trade Finance, Treasury, ATMs, Internet Banking, etc. Each of these systems had a huge number of customer accounts and very high transaction volumes. The top management didn't have a mechanism of having a consolidated view of business across all functions of the bank on real-time basis. The report generation used to happen, but collating data from all the branches and then making a consolidated report used to be a time-consuming process. A holistic view of the business could give insight to the decision makers at all levels to take appropriate business decisions.

BIS @ SBI

To overcome this challenge the bank decided to deploy a Cognos Business Intelligence solution. This BI implementation integrated data from nearly 15 source systems (with nearly 70 databases) to form a single enterprise data warehouse logical model. The scale of this BI deployment and also the complexity involved makes it the biggest BI deployment in BFSI segment in India. The system provides a dashboard view of information in hierarchical manner. It has empowered the decision makers to have actionable data leading to faster decision making based on latest information. Furthermore, in order to sell the right product to the right customer at the right time and through the right channel, the Bank also deployed UNICA Analytical CRM tool and Campaign Management solution, which also sits atop the EDW data.

Business impact

Considering the earlier time consuming manual process where information was collated from each branch and then with summarization at each level was passed on to the top management, now the whole process is automated and recentness of information is mostly the previous day's end-of-day closing data. Also, in the risk management segment information is being collated on real-time basis. This report generation has helped the bank to save on staff costs as atleast one person from each branch who was deployed just for the manual reporting purpose, now has been re-located to different functions. The system generates 248 reports daily for the top management, and each of the 13,800 branches have access to reports generated particularly for them. Dashboard covering the key focus areas is available to the top management with the ability to drill down to the each individual branch in each of the metrics being tracked. The system is used by nearly 28,000 business users across SBI in India and would be also be available to the users in the 32 countries where SBI has presence in addition to the users in the associate banks, in phases. Also, with the help of campaign management solution, the bank has managed to execute successfully 71 campaigns targeting 4.88 million customers. With relevant information being available to right people at right time, the bank has been able to move from “react and respond” to “predict and pre-empt” approach of business decision making.