Cognos selected to underpin international financial telecom society’s SWIFTWatch Portfolio – Sibos 2005 (BOOTH # A015, Hall B) COPENHAGEN, DENMARK

“TowerGroup finds that financial services institutions are adopting enterprise business intelligence dashboards as a pervasive and attentive eye to gauge process and system performance throughout their service delivery chain,” said Guillermo Kopp, vice president at TowerGroup. “Such transparency allows institutions, industry utilities, and networked service providers to improve operational efficiency by establishing peer learning and accountability at all levels.”

In selecting a reporting and analysis platform, SWIFT needed a Web-based solution that was scalable, intuitive and secure. Data transferred between financial institutions is very sensitive, so the solution had to guarantee that banks will not see competitor message traffic, and only have access to their own data. SWIFT ultimately chose Cognos Enterprise BI, anchored on Cognos PowerPlay® and Cognos ReportNet™.

Leveraging Cognos Enterprise BI, SWIFTWatch users receive a global overview of traffic and expenses, while product and marketing managers gain more detailed insights into the volume, cost and market share of their business activity over SWIFT. The Cognos solution only requires a Web browser, so no software installation is needed. From anywhere in the world, managers receive regular and timely data updates, compare data over multiple periods and export data to other applications. Standard reports containing overview traffic or cost data are also available to download, providing immediate highlights and trends.

“Cognos Enterprise Business Intelligence gives our members greater insight into message traffic and costs, and enables them to analyse trends over time, drill down from summary data to in-depth data and present data in different formats,” said André Boico, director of marketing at SWIFT. “This new generation of reporting and analysis provides both internal and external monitoring tools, which are essential in the heavily competitive industry in which our members operate today.”

The SWIFTWatch portfolio consists of two fundamental components – SWIFTWatch Reports and SWIFTWatch Analyser. SWIFTWatch Reports provide powerful business and market reporting via subscription. SWIFTWatch Analyser consists of traffic, message cost, and billing modules to enable sales, marketing and finance staff to explore data interactively and easily identify trends and exceptions.

“SWIFTWatch gives our sales force the data they need on a day-to-day basis to monitor the reciprocity of their correspondent relationships,” said Johan Gernaey, SWIFT coordinator at KBC Bank & Insurance Group, a Belgian independent, multi-channel bancassurance company that caters to over 11 million customers across Europe. “Since the new tool is online and user-friendly, we will be able to expand its benefits to all major KBC entities, giving them a powerful set of management information tools to support our strategic decisions."

Cognos is a recognized leader in delivering business intelligence and corporate performance management solutions for the banking and financial services industry. Nine of the top 10 banks in Europe and the United States use Cognos . Customers include Regions Financial, Bank of Ireland and First Citizens Bank. For more information about Cognos solutions for the banking and financial services industry, please visit http://www.cognos.com/solutions/industry/
banking-financial-services/insurance.html.

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About Cognos:
Cognos, the world leader in business intelligence and corporate performance management, delivers software and services that help companies drive, monitor and understand corporate performance.

Cognos delivers the next level of competitive advantage - Corporate Performance Management (CPM) - achieved through the strategic application of BI on an enterprise scale. Our integrated CPM solution helps customers drive performance through planning; monitor performance through scorecarding; and understand performance through business intelligence.