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Internaxx

Internaxx logo "These days, knowing your customers and the requirements of the market well gives you an important advantage in a reactive business like online trading. BusinessObjects enables us to take full advantage of the key information we have available. We are now able to align our decisions and customer investment and acquisition strategies according to the requirements and trends of the international financial markets in real time."

Rodolphe Marck
Director Information Systems
Internaxx

Challenge

As a bank and international online broker, Internaxx is called upon to work with customers from 155 different countries and needs to handle very large quantities of data, mainly from the share trading operations carried out by its customers. Being able to process this data efficiently constitutes a clear competitive advantage.

However, as the input flow of this data is not directly controllable and depends on the state of the stock market at any given time, Internaxx was not in a position to process the large volume of data with which it was confronted. It could only store it without being able to use it effectively. Any knowledge capital on the bank's activity was under-exploited.

Internaxx needed a tool which would allow it to process this data from both a quantitative and qualitative point of view to understand the requirements of its customers and prospects in detail and also to anticipate market demands and trends. Furthermore, Internaxx being a bank, it is subject to regulations issued by the local Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF) regulator—the financial sector monitoring commission—and also to regulations set by the new European circulars issued under the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFid), which in particular require an excellent knowledge of the customer's behavior throughout their business relationship with the financial institution. Data acquired while the customer is active must be used in protecting customer's interests.

Approach

Internaxx was looking for a tool that could consolidate business data on a single platform in order to carry out real-time analysis and obtain financial, accounting, and marketing reports – both for the company as well as reports intended for bank compliance. The aim was to reduce the time taken to create these reports and consolidate the data in order to give more time to carry out analysis and decide company strategy. Defining key indicators for the business was also an important factor in the choice of the tool.

After evaluating the various business intelligence (BI) packages available, Internaxx turned towards Business Objects, an SAP company, and opted for the BusinessObjects™ Enterprise XI Release 2 suite at the infrastructure level and Crystal Reports® for reporting, together with BusinessObjects Dashboard Manager and BusinessObjects Performance Manager. Indeed, Internaxx had been very quickly convinced by the experience and technology offered by BusinessObjects.

According to Rodolphe Marck, Director Information Systems at Internaxx, "The many references that BusinessObjects has from large companies constituted a guarantee as regards the durability of the investment and the software architecture of the proposed solution. As our volume of data was increasing on a huge scale, we needed an upgradeable solution which could keep up with our bank's expansion. Our SME size was therefore no obstacle in choosing the BusinessObjects suite."

Internaxx also saw a great advantage in the uniformity of the suite, which showed a high degree of consistency and compatibility with software solutions from other companies. Internaxx made use of Aptelia, a company specializing in BI, to install the BusinessObjects solutions. Aptelia produced the architecture for the solution from the data warehouse through to report creation. Aptelia gave Internaxx an implementation plan to allow it to master the various facets and features of the BI solutions.

Currently, about 10 people work on BI within Internaxx and about 50 reports are regularly updated daily, weekly, or monthly. The reports are varied and range from the analysis of the number of trading operations carried out over a given period to the rate at which prospects are converted into customers and includes the total commissions received over a period by country or customer profile. These reports contain and cross correlate both financial and commercial information along with marketing information. They also allow, for example, analysis to be carried out on the distribution of customers throughout the world and by region to enable marketing campaigns to be targeted better. "The BusinessObjects solution is coupled to a business workflow. When we receive a call from a customer or a prospect, a 'Ticker' is opened and the call then follows a precise route depending on the type of request. BusinessObjects allows us to measure the quality of service given relative to the thresholds we have set ourselves," explains Marck. "From this operational data obtained from our customer relationship management (CRM) application, we can optimize our business processes to give our customers a better service—and at a known and controlled cost."

Results

The solution provided by BusinessObjects has matured over time and has now become a real BI and operational tool. Indeed, in order to get the best use out of the system, those responsible for installing the BI project agreed on a whole series of common definitions and created a dictionary of special vocabulary used to analyze the reports. The creation of a common repository based on the standardization of vocabulary and definitions has provided a uniform way of measuring the data and business objects so that the analyses can be interpreted in the same way and accepted within the company anywhere in the world.

Thanks to all these tools and applications, Internaxx now has a global understanding of the company rather than a compartmentalized one. It is important to relate the customer acquisition rate for a region of the world with the revenue brought in from that region and the agreed prospect conversion investment.

Even though it at the moment it is still difficult to calculate the return on investment (ROI) on such a project, Internaxx is convinced of its added value and has already identified a number of advantages. Indeed, reports are now produced very quickly with a clear gain in productivity. Previously, each entity or department produced the same reports and spent 20% to 30% of their time in doing so. Now, reports are created quicker, which gives more time to analyze the results. This naturally enables investments, and from this, the company strategy, to be optimized. In particular, Internaxx can use the reports to determine whether the information about a customer correlates with their behavior. If not, Internaxx directs them to a more suitable product.

Furthermore, these reports can also be used to detect any behaviors which are suspect and put the company at risk. In other words, this tool both provides measurement indicators and can be used to define commercial targets, particularly in regard to communication campaigns aimed at increasing the prospect conversion rate and consequently the company's turnover. Marck concludes, "These days, knowing your customers and the requirements of the market well gives you an important advantage in a reactive business like online trading. BusinessObjects enables us to take full advantage of the key information we have available. We are now able to align our decisions and customer investment and acquisition strategies according to the requirements and trends of the international financial markets in real time."

About Internaxx

Created from a joint venture between Fortis Banque Luxembourg and TD Waterhouse, Internaxx is the main international online broker offering its services to international investors throughout the world. Internaxx gives its customers access to shares in the main international stock exchanges and allows real-time share trading at more than 15 stock exchanges in North America, Europe, and Asia either online or by telephone. It also offers a trading platform for derivatives (CFDs, Futures) and Forex as well as a Funds supermarket backed by the most reputed managers in the financial world.

TD Waterhouse is part of the TD Bank group which one of the largest providers of online financial services in the world offering banking services, reduced-price investment funds and insurance products and services.

Fortis Banque Luxembourg S.A. is one of the leading banks in Luxembourg. The bank's expertise covers financial services for private investors and companies, monetary and financial markets and investment and pension funds.

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