Banker's Net Link - Secure banking solutions from the Center - The General Center for Internet Services Inc. (GCIS) has all your secured banking application solutions and tools for a rich e-commerce experience.

For the international banking and financial community, the Center has designed powerful analytical solutions that uses our Banker's Net Link™ patented technology and lets users ask questions and get answers rapidly and easily. These are extremely capable applications that integrate the latest leading tools used in modern banking business today.

Additionally, these solutions enable senior financial executives to query questions about their whole banking structure and plot strategy, keeping a healthy balance between the bank's investment portfolio, deposits and it's loan structure. First and foremost, Business Intelligence (BI) is about using a variety of systems, tools, and technologies to provide corporate decision makers with the information they need to do their jobs effectively.

A typical case study: Nations Bank Corporation:
Since the merger with Nations Bank Corporation in 1998, the new Bank of America, headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, operates more than 4,700 banking centers in 22 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. From those offices 171,000 full-time employees provide a wide variety of consumer and commercial banking products and services to more than 30 million households across the US. For calendar year 1998, Bank of America had more than $ 6.5 billion in earnings on revenues of US $ 30.5 billion.

Bank of America's Corporate Treasury department uses an asset-liability model to keep a close eye on balancing its investment portfolio and deposits and loans. Profitability depends on creating the right balance between interest paid out to depositors and interest taken in on business, mortgage, and other loans and investments. Banks don't want to get caught holding low-interest, long-term loans, such as 30-year mortgages, when the interest rates the bank pays to depositors rise. This kind of careful balancing helps keep bank operations from ending up in the red.

To help Bank of America in its balancing act, 68 associates in the Corporate Treasury department have access to our Datamart Builder (tm) solutions, which consists of complex Oracle & GCIS databases. Managers and analysts use similar applications, combined with the bank's asset-liability model, to advance the bank's business interests and ensure profitability. Information in Bank of America's datamart comes through regular feeds from key operational applications, including loan, deposit, and investment systems. That information goes first into a large corporate data warehouse and then into the Corporate Treasury datamart.

Today, the department's datamart holds over 260 gigabytes, and it grows by approximately 11 gigabytes of fresh information each month. "We feed in all the raw-material data on loans and deposits and then crunch the numbers to forecast our net interest income for the upcoming month and out into the future", explains Jim Bailer, vice-president of Corporate Treasury Data Delivery at Bank of America. "Because we have the information to see how these products will change over time, it leads us to strategic initiatives".

For instance, depending on how the bank sees interest rates moving, says Bailer, "we may decide to increase or decrease the number of fixed-rate loans we have. Or, depending on what our interest-rate risk position is, we may want to take some action to mitigate some of that risk". Before the datamart was installed, the Bank of America Corporate Treasury department performed many of the same tasks, but relied solely on high-level information from the general-ledger system.

Bailer advocates the pro-active use of BI (Business Intelligence) tools and applications, such as his department's datamart and query tools. "For us, BI is leveraging the data we get from our loan, deposit, and investment systems and using that information to make tactical and strategic decisions for the corporation," says Bailer.

"I know that sometimes datamarts aren't utilized for business intelligence", he says. But in the Corporate Treasury department, managers pose queries about the business to the datamart and then use that information to gain an understanding of the underlying drivers of net interest income and interest-rate risk. Before the advent of the datamart, much of the same data was difficult to get to, stored away in a large corporate mainframe.

One of Bank of America's priorities was to make that data not only accessible but also useful. Installing and running a local datamart has also been less expensive to operate than the previous mainframe environment. As Bailer explains it, a large part of the battle to make key business information accessible to decision makers is picking the right combination of data, hardware, and software in which to deploy a BI system.

"We needed better, more user-friendly access to that data," he says. "We've taken the data, put it in a common format, put it in a midrange environment with good performance, and then selected a tool that allows managers and analysts to derive business knowledge from the data. When we were on the mainframe, the primary output of the datamart was mainframe reports, which were under-utilized".

For Bank of America's Corporate Treasury department, the success of the datamart hinges as much on the data-access tool, as on the information contained within it. Bailer especially likes the user interface and drill-down capabilities. "We felt that it had the best combination of ease of use, functionality, and technical strength", Bailer explains. "Without it, Corporate Treasury's datamart might have ended up under-utilized".

Conclusion
What you have just witnessed is a testimony of one of our important client, a major leading US bank: Bank of America. At the General Center for Internet Services, we work closely with Oracle and we develop very similar complex banking tools and applications that really help both Canadian and US banks in their daily operations. All our solutions are easy to use and output a vast amount of detailed critical banking data.

All the information coming from our datamart solutions is accurately analysed in it's finest details in our vast array of Enterprise Rx Planner™ ERP applications and tools. The architecture of these applications can also be used by Wall Street firms and brokerages, as well as on-line trading companies, that make the Internet a vital part of their whole operations.We would be very happy to meet with you and evaluate your exact banking needs at a convenient time and date that suits you and your peers. We would then draft you a complete report and supply you with an official written proposal of services. Feel free to contact us for additional information.

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