ROYAL BANK OF CANADA TAPS INEA PORTAL TO PROVIDE BUSINESS ANALYTICS

To better respond to business opportunities, RBC will extend INEA's analytic software to its branches through a Web Portal.

Recognizing the need to respond ever faster to business opportunities, Royal Bank of Canada, an INEA enterprise analytics customer since 1992, will extend the software's capabilities to the Web via the INEA Portal.

Toronto-based INEA's software delivers a unified view of profitability and performance--in the form of a scorecard--across a company's customers, products, channels and lines of business, typically residing in multiple systems and data stores. INEA's analytics pulls together financial and nonfinancial data from the diverse lines of business, legacy and ERP systems, data warehouses, in-house applications, spreadsheets, general ledgers and costing engines into a standard database.

By moving its INEA-powered management system to the Web, Royal Bank extends these capabilities to 1,200 retail branches. Designed for self-service, clients can drill down to view and analyze performance and profitability by customer, channel, product and business across different locations and time zones.

So far, more than 500 users in 12 international locations use INEA's analytics software to obtain information about business performance.

"The scorecard framework is an effective tool to help our retail banking division transition to a more sales-focused culture," said Alain Simard, vice president of finance information at Royal Bank. The previous scorecard system was manual intensive, which did not allow for rapid dissemination throughout the enterprise, he said. Automating the production and distribution of the scorecard via the Web, Simard said, provides hundreds of users with secure and timely information in a cost-efficient manner.

"INEA Portal provides our front-line decision makers with a single point of access for not only viewing their performance scorecards but also accessing resources that educate them on how each measure ties in with overall corporate strategy," Simard continued. "It's a highly effective way for us to communicate, in real time consistent information to a broad spectrum of users."