Nacional Financiera Measures Business Performance With Information Builders WebFOCUS

Nacional Financiera (Nafinsa) has selected the WebFOCUS BI and analytics platform to measure business performance and increase productivity. Nafinsa, a development bank established by the Mexican government, is responsible for promoting savings and investment through management projects, establishment of financing programs, and coordination of capital investments.

Faced with complex financial calculations, large databases, and manual information management processes, Nafinsa set out to acquire a business intelligence and analytics solution to simplify operations. “We had to perform several types of daily and weekly calculations, which meant we spent lots of time analyzing data with an unacceptable response time,” said Carlos Ivan Cobb Chew, alternate channels promotion director at Nafinsa. “We were determined to standardize and automate our analytics and decision-making processes.”

A bank selection committee compared market-leading BI tools according to applicable procurement laws, focusing on software vendors that were well positioned in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for analytic tools. They selected WebFOCUS for its affordable licensing terms and wide-ranging technical capabilities. In only four months the application, bearing the internal name “eBI Development,” was ready to automate decision-making processes in three important areas: Guarantees, Chains, and Credit. Each segment includes key performance indicators related to credit guarantees, account balances, financing terms, and other essential functions. The BI application makes it easy for managers to track important affiliations, statistics, balances, and many other banking details. Popular reports include Summary Detail Balances, Operations Summary, and Operations Detail. The eBI Development team continues to incorporate new features for data visualization, graphics, and trend analysis.

The primary sources of credit information come from Mexican financial institutions, which are required to submit credit information for Nacional Financiera registration. The bank also has a portal for examining electronic credit operations and supply chains. “For the three aspects of Nafinsa credit, we have developed numerous sectoral projects for specific markets,” added Chew. “Information Builders supplied a key platform for managing and measuring data. As the system has evolved, we have been able to combine data from multiple areas and enter it into a repository that allows us to perform multidimensional analysis of different product areas and programs.”

The new BI application includes a dynamic interface that supports mobile and wireless devices. It includes real-time alerts, analytics, financial reports, automated distribution of information, integration with the Microsoft Office suite, and web access. The system has provided a single source of information for the entire organization. Analysts use it to determine patterns of customer behavior as well as to monitor how prices affect bank revenue. With WebFOCUS, Nafinsa has succeeded in automating manual processes, decreasing the risk of information loss, and improving decision-making. It has been particularly helpful in generating critical reports for the National Banking and Securities Commission.