Banco do Brasil turns data into powerful, actionable insights

Banco do Brasil, the oldest bank in Brazil and second-largest bank in Latin America, encourages its employees to understand, use and analyze data. The bank branches take advantage of over 70,000 customized, user-built, reporting dashboards that rely on fast access to the most current mainframe data. Dashboard queries need to be executed quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively to support critical decisions in areas such as finance, sales and operations.

The Internal Controls department at Banco do Brasil needed faster access to managerial information in order to:

• Leverage new business opportunities at the branches
• Expedite the monitoring and control of operational losses
• Facilitate budget planning and execution
• Provide more up-to-date and accurate data for decision-making

Nevertheless, in addition to being a costly process in terms of processing and time, it required a window of more than 24 hours to generate all this information in a consolidated manner.

The bank also needed to provide employees with ongoing productivity data to help them evaluate and improve current bank processes and their own performance. For example, the sales teams needed timely access to quota attainment to monitor their productivity and potential to meet the bank’s goals.

To help solve these business challenges, Banco do Brasil realized it needed to partner with a company that was both trusted and experienced at managing businesses’ most mission-critical data and applications.

IBM turned out to be exactly what Banco do Brasil was looking for.

IBM implemented the Db2® Analytics Accelerator for z/OS® to boost the speed at which managerial information is accessed, opening up new business opportunities. Using the IBM® Db2 Analytics Accelerator, this step in the loan process was reduced to minutes—improving time to value for Banco do Brasil’s customers and return on capital for the financial institution itself.

Db2 Analytics Accelerator was also used to help employees ongoing productivity, as it gives the sales teams immediate access to quota attainment reporting, helping them to better allocate their time in appropriate activities.

The Db2 Analytics Accelerator also focused on department-level reporting, allowing the bank to consolidate multiple individual product-level reporting data marts, such as credit cards, savings, checking and insurance into a single warehouse. Using the Db2 Analytics Accelerator, the bank was able to retire multiple hardware and software platforms and concentrate its data warehouse in a mainframe environment.

Banco do Brasil’s Customer Relation Management (CRM) system was also positively impacted, as using the Db2 Analytics Accelerator as a single repository for multiple bank products provided a 360° view of their customers. This helped the bank better understand its customers and identify opportunities for the up-selling and cross-selling of products. Centralizing the information provided the finance and accounting teams a more accurate view of the bank’s overall financial status, elevating branch level efforts to a consolidated enterprise view.

The benefits of the Db2 Analytics Accelerator went beyond business reporting to delivering operational simplification and cost transparency, reducing efforts and costs across multiple platforms.

To enable all these vital workloads, Banco do Brasil deployed six IBM LinuxONE machines with over 1200 IBM Integrated Facilities for Linux® (IFL), supporting 14 Db2 Analytics Accelerators. This extensive and ever-growing analytics environment - with more than a petabyte of data - runs over a quarter of a million complex queries and an average of 138 terabytes per day.

To support high availability/disaster recovery, the LinuxONE systems are distributed across two distinct and geographically separated data centers.

After implementing the Db2 Analytics Accelerator, thousands of employees and numerous departments at Banco do Brasil are benefiting from real-time insights derived from complex queries accessing current mainframe data. This improved reporting, down to the branch level, has had significant impact on the bank’s positive business results quarter over quarter.

Banco do Brasil, partnering with IBM, has become one of the most data-driven financial companies in Brazil. The Db2 Analytics Accelerator is considered a business-critical technology for Banco do Brasil and is a must-have technology for all Db2 for z/OS organizations.

Banco do Brasil is the oldest and second largest bank in Brazil, as well as the second largest in Latin America. It has been one of the four most profitable Brazilian banks since the year 2000 and holds a strong leadership position in retail banking.