However, Chase Manhattan Global Investment Bank, a division of Chase Manhattan Corp., says it was in a better position than its competition: Having implemented Business Objects SA's business-intelligence suite earlier in the year, the bank was prepared to deliver highly detailed reports to the Fed, as well as to its own users, at the height of the disaster.

The volatility of global financial markets demands that major financial institutions such as Chase adapt quickly to change to minimize their risks. To achieve that agility, companies are turning to business-intelligence software that lets them integrate querying, reporting, and analysis of their critical risk-assessment and isolation data.

With greater and more timely access to information, users can make more-informed business decisions and react more quickly in an often unpredictable investment environment, says Martin Weinberg, VP and cross-product manager of information systems with the global market technology division of Chase Manhattan, in New York. With more than 70,000 employees in 48 countries, Chase holds $357 billion in assets and serves more than 30 million customers worldwide. Weinberg's division handles accounts for large institutions such as other banks.

During the Malaysian crisis, a Chase analyst created and distributed a report that broke out the level of risk for Chase Manhattan. "We had a response out immediately" from Chase to the Fed and from the Chase analyst to others in the company, Weinberg says, "and we could refresh that same report as needed." In such a volatile situation, reports usually have to be refreshed on a daily basis to provide brokers accurate information and updates.

Before Chase implemented BusinessObjects, users had to drop the data into a spreadsheet and E-mail it to others across distributed offices. While that approach worked for static, one-time reports, it presented serious problems in situations in which Chase had to update information constantly.

But too much information can be overwhelming. When companies implement business-intelligence software, many of them need solutions that simplify the user's task of creating and analyzing complex reports, Weinberg says, especially since most of those users aren't trained in data analysis. "In the old days, we were caught in a familiar cycle: The user would request the data, then wait for my IS staff to create the report. It was a cumbersome and time-consuming process," he says.

In the early 1990s, for example, Chase used Microsoft Access and Excel to connect to its databases. But the technology proved too complicated for the majority of nontechnical end users--brokers who didn't understand relational-database theory. Because they didn't know what all the business rules and data elements in the reports meant, they would often make mistakes when creating reports, and the data contained in those reports were prone to error.

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Illustration by Brian Rea
Photo by Catrina Genovese