Challenge: The small country of Luxembourg wields a financial power in European economic circles that is far greater than its geographic size would indicate. Although the Bank of Luxembourg is currently based exclusively in its home country here, its shareholders -- the CIAL group (Credit Industriel d'Alsace et de Lorraine) and the Deutsche Bank group -- reflect its international calling.

In a European marketplace where many banks offer broadly similar products and services, one differentiating factor is inventiveness -- a constant search for greater efficiency and security that has characterized banking and finance in Luxembourg for many years. Driven by this need for innovation and competitive advantage, the Bank of Luxembourg in 1991 began a major update of its IT infrastructure, and particularly of banking applications it had developed internally. As a result, the IBM 3090 mainframe running MVS and an Adabas database was replaced by an IBM AS/400 solution, a platform that promised an easy evolution, which it has since fulfilled.

Resolution: The modernization program did not stop there, because other areas at the bank were looking for a more capable solution to drive internal efficiencies and offer improved service to clients. The first of these was statistics processing, a responsibility of the Accounts and Budgets Department. The existing solution could not meet the bank's demands for integrity of results, or speed and flexibility of processing, not to mention the massive workload it caused at the end of each month. The obvious answer was a dedicated data warehouse solution.

'Start small' is a classic piece of advice for moving into data warehousing, but another fundamental axiom is to allow for the inevitable future growth. The AS/400 platform is ideal, offering a high degree of scalability, high-capacity storage opportunities, and ease of integration because peripherals and software are integrated with the platform, thus simplifying installation and implementation. The Bank of Luxembourg proved this for itself. In the space of just two weeks its pilot-project models were loaded, tested, verified, and put into operation.

Outcome: The first real project began in April, 1997. For a financial organization like the Bank of Luxembourg, a data warehouse is an important strategic tool, enabling tasks such as search and retrieval to be automated, and analysis tools to be used on an ad hoc basis. But just as important for the bank was the data warehouse’s potential for deeper analysis of data to produce richer, more coherent information that would enable faster and more quantifiable decision-making processes to occur. The first real project began in April, 1997. For a financial organization like the Bank of Luxembourg, a data warehouse is an important strategic tool, enabling tasks such as search and retrieval to be automated, and analysis tools to be used on an ad hoc basis. But just as important for the bank was the data warehouse’s potential for deeper analysis of data to produce richer, more coherent information that would enable faster and more quantifiable decision-making processes to occur. The first real project began in April, 1997. For a financial organization like the Bank of Luxembourg, a data warehouse is an important strategic tool, enabling tasks such as search and retrieval to be automated, and analysis tools to be used on an ad hoc basis. But just as important for the bank was the data warehouse’s potential for deeper analysis of data to produce richer, more coherent information that would enable faster and more quantifiable decision-making processes to occur.

Analyses are based on different criteria, such as the number of customers; the inheritance size, composition, and growth; calculations on profiles (again, grouped by various criteria); variations in inheritance (in inputs, variance); and measurements of the 'performance' of the inheritance (comparing inputs and withdrawals, and volume of transactions). Other axes can be added in future, specifically to meet other needs in departments such as marketing, audit and credit.