Western Alliance Bank
Investing in Success with Oracle Analytics Cloud
With more than $20B in assets, Western Alliance Bancorporation (WAL) is one of the country’s top performing banking companies and ranked #2 on the Forbes 2018 Best Banks in America list.
Critical Data Was Difficult to Withdraw
The bank had good visibility into profitability with Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS), but lacked a platform that could pull data from different sources, model it, and create visual stories. Financial planners were challenged to drill through to transaction-level detail to answer key questions that enable them to spot opportunities, forecast efficiently, and reduce risk. Addressing this need required tremendous manual effort by several analysts to combine data from multiple sources and reconcile against the PBCS instance.
WAL required a cloud analytics platform that would enable financial reporting and analysis on PBCS as well as provide critical ERP data.
Investing in a Platform for the Future
WAL requested a proof of concept (POC) using its own data to ensure that the selected technology platform would meet its specific requirements.
We delivered a fully functional, custom-built POC that demonstrated the features and functionality of Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC). All functional and technical concerns raised during the sales cycle were addressed, and the WAL finance team concluded that OAC met all of its success criteria for a future-state solution.
We implemented OAC by leveraging our quick start services – a repeatable process designed to accelerate the deployment of OAC and provide the finance team with convenient and up-to-date access to crucial financial data in a matter of weeks, while lowering the total cost of ownership.
Features of the OAC solution include:
- A self-service reporting model consisting of four subject areas. This reporting model is conformed across all four subject areas and therefore enables facilitated linking and drill-down from one area to another:
- Planning model sourced from PBCS
- Financial Information Systems model for detailed financial transactions
- Loan Accounts model for loan account balances
- Deposit Account model for deposit account balances
- A reporting model that supports 10 dimensions including Company, Cost Center, GL Account, Scenario, Customer, and Time
- Automated data transformation and upload processes into OAC
- 10 custom reports that required discovery, design, development, and user acceptance testing
One of the hidden values of collaborating with Perficient was their impact on the design and flow of visualizations. Simple grid-like presentation of data does not convey much. Visually telling a story that instantly conveys its importance is much more powerful.Valentino Hafalia, VP, Financial Planning and Analysis, Western Alliance Bank, Member FDIC
Results
A Modern, Robust, and Extensible Financial Analytics Platform
Western Alliance Bank achieved its goal of having a reliable, scalable, and easily extensible foundation that enables financial planners to perform modern and dynamic analytics on OAC.
Additional benefits include:
- Transformed collaboration between several analysts into a self-service reporting capability
- Dashboards tailored for financial planners automatically refresh with the latest information
- Minimal reliance on IT with the financial business team capable of maintaining and extending OAC
- Greater operational efficiency
With an aggressive timeframe in setting up our initial data models and visualizations, the project was completed on time and on budget.Andrew Boucher , VP, Market Risk Management, Western Alliance Bank. Member FDIC
Hear Firsthand from Western Alliance Bank
VIEW OUR ON-DEMAND WEBINAR
Hear from both Andrew Boucher and Valentino Hafalia regarding their experience with OAC, lessons learned, and how OAC could benefit your organization.
Watch the full on-demand webinar here.
READ MORE: Q&A SESSION
At the end of the webinar, we received some great questions from the audience.
