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The growing volumes of business of Life financial group demanded reorganization of a management system. Having created a reporting system on Sybase IQ, the financial group improved the mechanism of transfer pricing that allowed it to save millions of dollars a year.

The Life financial group is included into the first 40 largest credit institutions by the amount of assets and into the first 20 Russian banks on the volume of the attracted household deposits. Seven banks of group in total have 260 offices and service more than 2 million clients in 75 regions of the country.

The principle of transfer pricing according to which divisions make out each other bills for the rendered services is the cornerstone of work of financial group and also raise and place money under different interest rates. Such mechanism allows to estimate effectiveness of work of divisions better. Effective system operation of transfer pricing is impossible without regular providing different reports: balances, reports about financial results, payment schedules, etc. For creation of these reports the system based on Microsoft Excel was used earlier, however as a result of business development volumes processed given and requirements to the frequency of obtaining account increased so that a former system ceased to cope with them. Besides, Excel did not allow to check sources of summary indicators.

The need for a new reporting system became obvious. According to the head of department of software of Probusinessbank Yury Gudashevsky as in the system of transfer pricing the original methodology of calculations is applied, it was simpler to create a system, than to look for and adapt suitable industry solution.

The kind of work with data caused the architectural requirement to a system: the specialized DB — the data warehouse should be its cornerstone. As the company actively uses software tools of Sybase, the choice naturally fell on Sybase IQ. As Gudashevsky Yury noted, good work of Sybase IQ with any requests (thanks to pokolonochny data storage), support of standard hardware and reasonable price became additional arguments for benefit of this choice.

Development of a reporting system which part also Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) DBMS was took about six months. The ASE function consists in data preparation for storage: are loaded into this DB given from the workflow system (Lotus Domino), from the automated banking system (RS-Bank Pervasive) and other systems. In the same place, using stored procedures, cleaning, consolidation of data and generation of transfer transactions then data are loaded into IQ are executed. A client part of a system was written on PowerBuilder. "We work with PowerBuilder since 1999 therefore we, one may say, had no tenders, we trust Sybase, very long time ago we use its products" — Yury Gudashevsky said.

"Thanks to the system of transfer pricing [on the basis of Sybase IQ] each department of bank the financial result can count groups and make decisions on the business operations proceeding from a clear understanding of cost efficiency of transactions". Philip Samarets, head of treasury, JSB Probusinessbank, FG "Life"

About 30 people use a system: president of financial group, specialists of treasury and analysts of divisions. Reports from the storage storing data about 50 million transactions are issued daily; on generation of one report several minutes leave. Maintenance of a system is executed by one specialist.

Only thanks to payment schedules a system allows financial group to save annually considerably. "Banks need to know how many means will come and how many will leave that to pay all clients in time — Yury Gudashevsky explains. — Without having this system, banks were kept cash in storages more, than it was necessary". Besides, the chance of fast calculation of own financial results is given to divisions by clear understanding of cost efficiency of transactions, the head of treasury of Probusinessbank Philip Samarets emphasized. In the future the banking group is going to use possibilities of storage for capital allocation optimization.