Key Increases Its Business Intelligence

For KeyCorp, strengthening customer relationships and providing employees with data for making informed decisions are high priorities. For this reason, the Cleveland-based institution has come to depend on Cognos, a Burlington, Mass.-based software company and its Business Intelligence (BI) Series 7 product.

The software allows risk managers, product managers, auditors and the collection department at Key to view the same information, stored in a centrally located server, instantaneously on their desktops.

"Employees are able to look at the interrelationships between data and obtain a complete overview of how the business is performing over the life span of the loan," said Shravan Kotha, senior vice president for decision science at $83 billion KeyCorp.

"The Cognos solution enables us to rapidly react to market changes," Kotha said. "We can maximize selling opportunities and address problems before they become major issues, resulting in improved customer service and increased revenue."

With knowledge comes power. "We can learn more about our customers and products faster by applying that knowledge and taking action," said Kotha. "For example, if we made an exception for a home equity loan, Cognos BI will allow us to determine if we took the right action or not."

Earlier this year, Key's auto finance and residential real estate divisions became the first to deploy the Cognos BI solution. The real estate division uses Cognos to integrate data from disparate systems in order to measure and manage delinquencies and charge-off levels by state, underwriter and/or product.

The auto finance division uses Cognos to analyze-based on pre-determined key performance indicators-the performance of auto dealers across the United States from whom it has acquired auto loans. This information allows KeyCorp to use a multiple ranking system for car dealers providing enough information to rank the best dealer and the best loan.

Key is considering adding new lines of business such as Corporate Finance and Key Capital Partners, as well as moving Cognos BI from a desk top version to a Web-enabled solution.

The Cognos product features an online analytical processing (OLAP) tool, PowerPlay, which draws information from relational databases to model and build "PowerCubes"-data sets containing millions of consolidated rows of data and hundreds of thousands of categories. Business rules and calculations (for example, percentage growth and market share change) can be built right in, and time series analysis is delivered automatically. Some 25 different qualifying dimensions are used to obtain the measurements needed for consistent business intelligence solutions.

PowerCubes allow KeyCorp to analyze "what-if" situations, and to customize reports once the analytical dimensions have been determined.

Another bank employing the Cognos solution is Regions Bank, based in Birmingham, Ala. Branch managers in Regions' retail banking division use Cognos to reconcile cash balances, measure customer profitability, develop cash and sales reports, and monitor profitability of online services.

The product has enabled Regions to gain unprecedented insight into business operations, according to Ed Solomon, senior vice president. "Cognos allows Regions to derive maximum value from our existing data warehouse investment. In fact, our first 'cube' for analysis of our loan system was up and running in just two days."