Erste Group Bank consolidates Big Data Analytics with Oracle

Erste Group Bank gains 360° view of customers and increases business performance by consolidating Big Data Analytics on a single Cloud platform

Erste Group Bank is a financial services provider in Central and Eastern Europe, offering retail banking for private customers, as well as corporate banking, mainly for small and medium-sized enterprises. Part of Erste’s growth strategy is the acquisition of financial services institutions across Central and Eastern European countries. However, a growing demand for more powerful big data analytics capabilities and for consolidation of acquired companies with established business processes and IT infrastructures led to Erste’s decision to modernize its big data infrastructure.

“We used Oracle Big Data Appliance to consolidate the data analytics of our parent company, Erste Group Bank, on a single, modern system. The powerful technology— which is easy to set up and run—enables us to gain a 360º view of customers, deliver innovative services, and strengthen our brand.”
Branislav Šebo, CEO, Erste Group IT International GmbH

Products list

Business challenges

Deliver real-time data from consolidated sources, as well as modeling capabilities integrated with historical data, to support 360º customer profiles, individual recommendations, and an omnichannel digital customer experience

Implement a coordinated approach for regulatory, risk, and finance reporting and analysis to bring data quality and data security to a new level of excellence in all local markets where the bank is present

Consolidate big data analysis solutions from Erste’s subsidiaries onto a single platform to reduce administration efforts and to achieve high quality results—sharing components and data where possible and using open-source technologies where appropriate

Secure investments by making sure that the platform can be sustained in the future and will be able to handle big data analytics projects across all countries that Erste serves

We have a long-lasting, trustful partnership with Oracle. It was really good news when the proof of concept showed that Oracle Big Data Appliance is the best technology for big data analytics available on the market. Oracle’s clear commitment, intensive support, and ability to seamlessly integrate our partner, Cloudera, in the project guaranteed its complete success.

Results

Enabled Erste to generate 360º customer profiles, deduce individual recommendations, and ensure a consistent customer experience across all digital channels and throughout all branches by consolidating the bank’s heterogeneous big data analytics infrastructure onto Oracle Big Data Appliance with Oracle Datasource for Apache Hadoop

Reduced development and delivery times for new data analytics projects and tasks by avoiding complex integration of local data sources and processes—empowering Erste to set up a data lake and a risk assessment tool for the whole group, implement a science lab for data scientists, and develop an internationally consistent online banking interface

Improved data quality for regulatory, risk, and financial reporting and analysis by eliminating sources of errors in data capture and transfer from and between national subsidiaries

Reduced maintenance efforts and costs, and improved data security by replacing national subsidiaries’ data analytics solutions with Oracle Big Data Appliance as one comprehensive and powerful platform

Achieved flexibility and performance of big data analytics by leveraging the capabilities of Oracle Big Data Appliance to employ open source technologies such as Hadoop, Spark, or Kafka, as well as big data analytics services in the cloud

Secured investment by implementing a group-wide, standard platform to deliver Big Data as a Service to Erste’s subsidiaries in all countries, which will cover the needs of future digital projects entirely

Leveraged expert knowledge and avoided strain on in-house IT teams by outsourcing both implementation and operation of the big data analytics platform to Oracle Consulting Slovakia

Partners

Several Oracle Partners were involved in the project. Cloudera supplied the Hadoop distribution that is deployed on Oracle Big Data Appliance and assisted Oracle Consulting Slovakia during the proof of concept. Arrow ECS sponsored the hardware that was used during the proof of concept. Fujitsu contributed to the hardware sales process. SAS supplied the corporate risk solution for Erste Group that was deployed as the first productive application on the platform. The project was completed on time and within budget.

Published:August 2, 2018