Elavon Monitors Merchant Transactions and Trends With BI

Global Payments Provider Banks on Guided Ad Hoc, Predictive Analytics, and Mobile Technologies

Elavon Inc. is a leading global provider of payment services, including credit and debit card transactions in the U.S., Europe, Mexico, Brazil, Puerto Rico, and Canada. This subsidiary of U.S. Bank offers point-of-sale (POS) authorization and reporting for all major credit and debit cards, gift cards, and prepaid cards, as well as risk management and electronic check services. Founded in 1991 and headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, Elavon serves more than one million clients in the retail, hospitality, airline, healthcare, education, and public sectors. The company processes approximately six million transactions daily.

In a highly automated industry, innovative use of technology is the key to competitive advantage. Unfortunately, Elavon was struggling to consolidate about a dozen legacy reporting environments, many of which were acquired through mergers and acquisitions. According to Magesh Rajendran, vice president of Global Reporting at Elavon, having too many reporting tools was complicating internal development and support issues.

Without corporate standards for creating reports and queries, it was hard to make optimal use of IT resources. Some of Elavon’s month-end reports generated a billion I/O operations and took more than six hours to run. The company had multiple month-end reporting processes running simultaneously, which pushed the old reporting tools past their maximum capacity and created performance issues that caused data quality problems.

By overhauling its disjointed reporting strategy and standardizing on Information Builders’ powerful, scalable, feature-rich WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) platform, Elavon is using information to enhance many critical facets of its operations – from sales and marketing to business planning and customer service.

“It’s faster and less expensive to have one common reporting environment,” Rajendran notes. “By adopting WebFOCUS, which comes with comprehensive features like its RStat predictive analytics solution, Elavon doesn’t have to maintain multiple skill sets.”

A Cohesive Reporting Strategy

Using WebFOCUS, Elavon has created a three-tiered reporting environment that includes:

• Analytic dashboards for executives and front-line managers, as well as customer-facing dashboards for more than 600,000 merchants
• An ad hoc reporting environment based on WebFOCUS InfoAssist for business analysts
• Guided ad hoc reports that enable people throughout the company to drill down, select columns, and slice and dice merchant data. Users of this self-service environment don’t need any training to run the reports, manipulate data, schedule reports, or save them to a library

“Elavon’s entire focus is on delivering reliable and secure payment solutions to help businesses succeed in an increasingly complex global marketplace,” explains Jefrino Afonso, senior vice president for Global Data Management at Elavon. “We chose to replace our outdated reporting tools with WebFOCUS because it minimizes custom coding, reduces development time, and gives us lots of options for reporting and BI.

“Plus, WebFOCUS offered the scalability we needed to handle high volumes of large reports, run by a broad base of users. Whether it’s drilling down into payment data or turning it into a 3D chart, WebFOCUS gives us out-of-the-box functionality for our needs.”

A New BI Standard

WebFOCUS has become Elavon’s enterprise reporting standard, eliminating excessive stress on IT resources and providing more comprehensive analysis capabilities to employees and merchants. For example, it has built customer-facing dashboards and reports that enable more than 600,000 merchant clients to monitor credit cards, merchant processing accounts, and other types of electronic payments. The company has also created mobile BI functionality for business development personnel, and developed predictive analytic capabilities for marketing, sales, and business planning.

The WebFOCUS Reporting Server runs on Windows and Unix servers, drawing data from Sybase ASE, Sybase IQ, and Oracle Database 11g. Elavon is creating domain-specific data marts on an Oracle Exadata Database Machine to enable people in operations, business development, and finance to quickly produce accurate reports from sanctioned enterprise data sources.

Popular WebFOCUS reports include transaction summaries sorted by cardholder and business, such as Statement Review, Merchant Analysis, Interchange Summary, and Chargeback Reporting. Some reports present spending at specific merchants, as determined by total dollar amount spent. Other reports recap spending over designated time periods and locations, so merchants can analyze data about fees, sales volume, interchange rates, chargebacks, and downgrades.

Merchants can analyze aggregate transaction data to identify their best-performing stores or compare their card activity to industry benchmarks. For example, a restaurant can see how its payment data compares with other restaurants in its region; a retail chain can see how its gross volume, sales volume, or interchange rates compare to industry leaders. While WebFOCUS reports have been available for some time, Elavon is now adding greater interactivity, data visualization, and mobile computing capabilities.

“Information Builders has always had a powerful reporting engine,” says Afonso, adding that WebFOCUS was the only BI tool that was scalable enough to handle a high volume of reports and a large base of users. “In recent years, they have added comprehensive data visualization capabilities as well, along with technology to present interactive dashboards and reports on tablets and smartphones,” says Afonso. “They give us one core product set, which means we don’t have to integrate third-party products or add plug-ins to obtain advanced BI capabilities. We have a one-stop shop for everything related to BI and reporting.”

Predictive Analytics and Mobile BI

Elavon’s current dashboards will soon be accessible via tablets and smartphones, along with WebFOCUS Active Technology reports that permit offline analysis. Developers are also working with business development managers to identify useful mobile functionality throughout the company. For example, they want to empower salespeople to review accounts, contracts, and pricing models when they are away from the office, so they can instantly see what customers currently have under contract and how best to price or bundle additional services.

“Irrespective of what device they have, salespeople will be able to pull down the latest pricing models or review the fundamentals of an account they are visiting,” says Afonso. “WebFOCUS lets us create interactive BI apps so the salespeople can answer questions for themselves without picking up the phone to call a support person.”

Rajendran likes WebFOCUS’ mobile functionality because it allows developers to adhere to the proper security principles when dealing with sensitive data. In addition, he says WebFOCUS leverages HTML5 and JavaScript™ to offer robust data visualization, interactivity, and animation capabilities, taking full advantage of the native interface characteristics of each tablet and phone.

“We are building a mobile BI solution that works on all devices, with familiar gestures and graphics,” Rajendran explains. “WebFOCUS ensures our users will have a rich, device-specific experience, yet Elavon won’t have to develop unique solutions for each device.”

Afonso says delivering these capabilities makes perfect sense. “It’s all about equipping and adapting the workforce for the future,” he stresses. “Mobile BI is an obvious step for us, and we like where Information Builders is going with the technology.”

In a related effort, Elavon is using WebFOCUS RStat – an innovative solution for predictive analytics – in conjunction with services from Information Builders and Fractal Technologies, to create predictive models and scoring applications that will permit employees to more accurately forecast sales, segment customers, and target likely prospects for specific products and services.

“Combining predictive with post-production insight gives you the biggest bang for the buck,” Afonso explains, referring to the probable return on their investment in BI technology. “RStat enables us to be more strategic as we address business development initiatives that are likely to grow the business.”

For example, by analyzing data from the pre-sales cycle, Elavon can more accurately identify cross-sell and up-sell opportunities by predicting the likelihood of certain types of businesses needing certain bundles of services based on the penetration of those services among other companies in that industry. Developers are also using RStat to create an attrition model to predict when a merchant might defect based on fluctuating payment statistics, such as reduced transactions processed, reduced calls into the transaction center, and other variables that indicate a falloff in services.

Unparalleled Vendor Support

According to Afonso, what’s unique about Information Builders is its level of customer attention. “I have never seen this much support from a technology vendor before,” he emphasizes. “This makes my decision about whether to work with Information Builders or IBM or any other BI vendor so much easier.

“Information Builders’ attitude of service and support pervades the entire company, from the senior executives to the product managers to the sales reps. Information Builders’ CEO has done a heck of a job promoting this customer-centric culture,” Afonso concludes. “It’s what our CEO strives to do as well, which is one of the reasons this is such a good marriage.”