Kempen & Co Standardizes on WebFOCUS

Enterprise BI Streamlines Financial Reporting, Risk Management, and Compliance Operations

Banks and securities agencies such as Kempen & Co operate in a highly regulated business environment requiring constant oversight by managers. Active in asset management, investing, and corporate finance, Kempen & Co has an impressive track record developing long-term client relationships based on customized, high-quality advice.

Such activities require comprehensive reporting tools that let employees drill down into current information about customers, profitability, and myriad operational details. When Kempen's managers had problems accessing information from an HP Alpha OpenVMS system, the company chose WebFOCUS to expand its capabilities.

"Previously, many of our reports were compiled in a more or less ad hoc fashion, and information had not been recorded in a consistent manner," admits Frank Terlien, information manager at Kempen & Co in Amsterdam. "Information Builders did a proof of concept to demonstrate how easily WebFOCUS could access data from our RMS tables on the Alpha system and combine it with data from other information systems. Within six days they had created several useful reports for our stock brokerage department."

About 150 Kempen & Co employees currently use the WebFOCUS enterprise-scale business intelligence (BI) platform from Information Builders to consolidate information into a user-friendly reporting, analysis, and information-delivery environment.

"Our internal reporting tasks are easier, more timely, and more accurate with WebFOCUS," says Terlien. "Our employees are better able to do their jobs. Our reporting is quicker. We are more efficient. Account managers have more time for customers, and can advise them more rapidly because they have faster access to better information. They can analyze yesterday's performance today and quickly discern important trends in the data."

An Enterprise Foundation

Leveraging the proof of concept, Kempen created a financial information dashboard that draws information from Kempen's billing application, central fund registration system, broker information system, trading system, general ledger (GL), and customer relationship management (CRM) system. "WebFOCUS includes standard database adapters to retrieve information from many different application environments, even though our data is stored in a mix of several databases," Terlien explains.

Soon, three Kempen employees had been trained in WebFOCUS and were busy creating additional reports. They began with the stock brokerage department, where dealers are hungry for analytics. One popular WebFOCUS report compares time spent with each account versus account profitability. Another report measures the change in profit over a given time period to determine the top 25 accounts that are trending up and the top 25 accounts that are trending down. This information helps dealers balance efforts with results so they can spend their time wisely. It also helps management compare the performance of various dealers and work teams.

"In the past, our account managers could not obtain this type of integrated information," says Terlien. "They just viewed basic Microsoft Access reports with no drill down. Once we started using WebFOCUS, we realized that much more of their time could be spent analyzing opportunities and servicing customers rather than gathering data."

Thanks to WebFOCUS' Alert Reporting feature, Kempen's account managers do not have to continually peruse reports for information. When certain predefined conditions are met, WebFOCUS generates reports automatically and distributes them to the pertinent individuals. "People receiving these reports know before they open them that something important has happened within their areas of responsibility," says Terlien.

Commonly called "exception reporting," the philosophy is simple: give people less information to analyze, not more. Dealers don't have time to constantly analyze their activities, let alone hunt down problems. But if accounts aren't profitable and brokers are spending too much time on them, they will be notified by the reporting system to focus their efforts elsewhere.

In-Depth Financial Analysis

Many Kempen employees use WebFOCUS dashboards to run reports on demand. For example, financial officers use WebFOCUS to view information in CODA financial management software, which contains general ledger, accounts receivable (AR), accounts payable (AP), and other core financial functions. Terlien used the WebFOCUS financial modeling language (FML) to produce many standard reports for this domain because it simplifies the process of creating, calculating, and presenting financially oriented data.

"The WebFOCUS financial modeling tool uses the hierarchy from the GL system to create GL reports, profit-and-loss reports, balance sheets, and other key accounting summaries," he says. "It puts the figures where I want them and creates the correct look, feel, and format for many financial reports."

The financial modeling tool also makes it easy to perform columnar or inter-row calculations, inter-account calculations, and custom sorting and grouping. It can dynamically generate summary statements from details in other reports and transfer balance sheet items across years. Because WebFOCUS rolls up data directly from the GL at run time, Kempen has avoided the costly and laborious job of developing a data warehouse to store financial data.

"WebFOCUS lets me drill down from a high level to the lowest level in the GL system," Terlien says. "We have found it to be two to three times faster than our previous BI tools."

WebFOCUS supports Kempen's international customer base because it works in all countries and supports all languages. It can process any local language by reading and interpreting national characters embedded in any source and handling all sorting, case conversion, and formatting of dates, currency, and numbers. Users can even display different currencies in one column, so a single financial report can encompass multiple geographic regions.

Extending Excel

Previously, most of Kempen's account managers developed financial reports using Microsoft Excel. However, while Excel is ideal for standalone analysis tasks, it is not a true workgroup system, making it difficult to enforce data integrity and consistency among a team of analysts. As a consequence, these managers found themselves continually consolidating spreadsheet data into centralized repositories of financial information, adding an extra step whenever they had to generate monthly financial reports.

Terlien used WebFOCUS to provide a framework for creating and deploying enterprise financial processes. Today nine people in the finance department access WebFOCUS reports through a dashboard to complete the monthly reporting cycle within three or four days after the end of each month. "Formerly, it took longer and required more effort," says Terlien. "Now the business is more responsive. Management gets the information quickly and can make corrections immediately when payments are overdue, accounts are delinquent, and so forth."

Kempen's financial analysts can still use Excel for common reporting and analysis tasks. Thanks to direct integration with WebFOCUS, they no longer need to manually key and rekey data from one system into another, enabling Kempen to leverage its existing spreadsheet models without manually concatenating data. From a standard Web browser, users can retrieve WebFOCUS financial reports as fully formatted Excel spreadsheets, and then click on embedded hyperlinks to drill down to detail data. Financial professionals can generate native Excel formulas and PivotTables as well as update the central database – simply by altering the cells within the WebFOCUS report and saving it as a new file. Data integrity is maintained in a workgroup setting.

Meanwhile, Kempen's risk department uses exception reporting to ensure critical account issues are dealt with immediately. For example, if a portfolio's value drops and the account holder lacks sufficient reserves to cover the outstanding balance, WebFOCUS generates a risk management report to cover the deficit. "This is all proactive now, thanks to ReportCaster and the alerts we have set up with exception reporting," says Terlien. "We used to have to periodically review these reports to find these exceptions and then manually notify the account holders. Now the risk department can be more proactive."

That's a huge benefit in today's volatile financial markets, where banks and brokers face more rigorous scrutiny than ever before. Being able to quickly assess volatility and identify profitable accounts helps Kempen comply with increasingly stringent banking and trading regulations. WebFOCUS also offers a powerful archiving facility for financial reports and other electronic content, so financial professionals can easily satisfy the information retention guidelines posed by European regulatory bodies.

"Thanks to the breadth of WebFOCUS and its depth in financial reporting, we can reach into many different types of data to gather pertinent information quickly," concludes Terlien. "Now that we have a standard reporting environment, we can analyze data more consistently and with greater accuracy than ever before."