BNP Paribas Securities Services has deployed Tibco's Spotfire data analytics and visualisation technology both internally and to provide interactive reports to its investor clients, reducing the time taken to publish information from months to days.
The investment advisory arm of the French bank provides a range of data on financial markets to its asset manager customers in order to aid trading decisions. While this information had previously been provided either in paper or PDF format, the firm decided to implement Spotfire in 2008 to offer clients access to more information at shorter intervals than previously possible.
"The idea is to provide everything with a tool and to give the end user the same figures that they find in their PDF, but to give them the ability to drill down behind the figures, to understand the key information," Laurent Chauvirey, head of Interactive Reporting Expertise Centre at BNP Paribas, told ComputerworldUK at Tibco's Transform event in Paris.
"For example they can change the currency of the reporting on the fly, or exclude something for whatever reason, or focus on a specific part because there is a crisis somewhere in the world and they want to understand what the impact will be on their assets."
BNP Paribas used Tibco's software to build a customer-facing platform called Data Navigator Advanced Suite (DNA Suite), which was made available through its web portal.
This has allowed the firm to reduce the refresh rate for data from months to days, which means its clients can react more quickly to changes in the market.
"If this month there is a crisis on the US dollar, then they want to see the impact of this on their funds straight away. The DNA platform makes it easier for them to access all of the information and filter the criteria. Otherwise they would have to contact us and ask us to do rework on the PDF, and it could take a month, which might be too late as they want it today."
Since implementing Spotfire, BNP has worked on adding functionality, and is currently developing a feature that would allow users to perform a 'stress test' to show the impact of major shifts affecting markets. This would allow them to define their own parameters for the data.
The bank is also in the process of widening the roll-out of the software within the organisation to improve the reporting capabilities of internally, having begun the deployment in the past 12 months.
"Most of the departments use BusinessObjects for their reporting, but they are facing the rigidity of the tool, and they want to be more agile for delivering new reporting. They have their classical stream to schedule reporting from us, but they also want to analyse the figures, especially in finance where they might want to find out if a client is profitable or not. They have to analyse the figures on different angles and not predefine."
He added: "The two tools are working together and are not competing. If you are looking for fixed reporting and mass reporting you can use BusinessObjects. But if you want to go deeper and drill down, and have more information on data Spotfire adds value."
He said that the ability to access its data more easily has freed up its analyst staff and reduced the burden on IT.
"If you want to analyse figures and understand what has happened, it is directly on the end of the business analysts, it is not on the IT end. With this type of tool people are not writing a specification to IT to deliver new reporting, they directly use the platform and make the analysis themselves. So it saves time."
Separately, BNP Paribas Securities Services announced yesterday that it has also rolled out product lifecycle management and collaborative technologies from Dassault Systems.
The 3DExperience platform is aimed at enhancing productivity, and allowing the employees to share information digitally across its departments including and asset fund, clearing and financial services divisions.
This will further lower the time to bring products to market, with the bank anticipating a 20 percent reduction.