Fortis Bank Belgium

Business Intelligence Solution: Improved Speed, Quality and TCO 
Nowadays, banks manage almost unimaginable amounts of data. It's usually operational information from which very useful commercial value can be extracted. Discovering the correlations between the elementary data and necessary reporting has historically required a lot of manpower, storage capacity and infrastructure.

Fortis Bank Belgium (Fortis) needed to mine its data to produce actionable information while reducing costs. It needed a business intelligence solution (BI). Fortis investigated the possibility of running their business processes on a mainframe platform, and to locate part of their BI on a Windows NT-platform.

Michel Van Laethem, IS project manager, says: "We suspected that the cost of implementing a new BI system would, by far, be reduced on an NT-platform compared to a mainframe platform. Our suspicions turned out correct. First, because we opted for the Sybase IQ data warehouse tool, allowing us to store huge amounts of data and to detect correlations. Second, because storage on NT is much cheaper, thus decreasing our TCO drastically."

"In contrast with previous infocenter systems and many other traditional relational database management systems (RDBMS), BI on Sybase IQ requires far less physical storage capacity," continues Van Laethem. "Moreover, the data loading time from the mainframe to Sybase IQ is highly accelerated and the data query response time is strongly reduced."

Ad Hoc Queries to Double – IQ Can Handle It
Today, Fortis users run about 115,000 ad hoc queries per month, a figure expected to double in the near future. The results are astonishing: Sybase IQ responds to 57 percent of ad hoc queries in less than one second. Less than one percent of ad hoc queries require more than three minutes of response time. Each month, 1.5 terabytes of raw data is loaded requiring 500 gigabytes of storage capacity in Sybase IQ, compared to six terabytes in another database—a serious cost reduction compared to the traditional relational databases. This is yet another vital strength of Sybase IQ, knowing that some tables contain more than 500,000,000 rows.

Sybase IQ, combined with Business Objects' reporting tool, enables users in the different Fortis departments to make more and more complex ad hoc queries. Additionally, queries are processed much faster and the response quality is much higher. The tool also allows users to consult the database more frequently for the follow-up of transactions, portfolio volumes, etc., increasing their proactivity.

More Intense Coaching of Local Branches
Because of  Sybase IQ, District Managers can now monitor, coach and launch commercial activities on the basis of market surveys coming from local branches as often as they wish.

"All divisions within Fortis are now able to explore the new possibilities of our business intelligence or will be in the near future: from sales to marketing, financial services, payments, bonds and arbitration. Our mainframe infrastructure, however, will remain the basis for all of the bank's operational activities."

Fortis implemented Sybase's IQ technology in half a day—with one person.

"Sybase's technology is extremely user-friendly," explains internal IT expert Jean-Louis Catin. "But above all, it is exceptionally high-performing. This is the strongest product I have come across in my career, something I wouldn't admit that often. There is no doubt whatsoever that another technology would not have offered our users the same service as Sybase IQ does. And all this with just one Windows NT-server, a quadriprocessor Pentium III 900 MHz with two gigabytes of RAM and an 800 gigabyte hard disk. Another server will be installed soon as a back-up or to take up some of the load."