Oracle's S. Ramakrishnan, group vice president and general manager for Oracle Financial Services Analytical Applications, was in New York last week to provide an update on how financial services institutions are leveraging tailored technology from Oracle - including the recently announced Oracle Financial Services Data Warehouse - to manage the complex information needed to compete profitably and effectively address stringent regulatory requirements.
The changed regulations arising from the financial crisis have dramatically altered what is expected now of banks, said Ramakrishnan. There are consequences for banks with regard to collating and gathering data at a very granular level and performing extremely complex computations on that type of aggregated data and also doing that on an ad hoc and what-if manner with near-immediate results.
The environment has changed from what it used to be 3 or 4 years ago when it was adequate on a quarterly or monthly basis to receive submissions from various parts of the institution and collate the reporting for submission to a regulator. That can be contrasted with the current scenario where there is a need to put all the data at the most atomic level together and have the ability to what-ifs, stress tests, simulations and re-computations on demand. "That is the kind of change that we are now seeing and addressing," explains Ramakrishnan.
Addressing these changing requirements, Oracle offers a combination of a data warehousing product, which is a financial services industry data model, combined with critical analytical applications that build this class of risk computations, profitability, capital adequacy and other related computations, he said. "There are whole bunch of computations that we are able to do through analytical applications that we offer and lastly all of this runs on Exadata, the exciting Oracle technology that dramatically speeds up load times, computational times and query times."
It is "almost a perfect storm," Ramakrishnan observes, that is comprised of a completely and dramatically revised data demand, computational process need, and the availability of an Exadata-like technology. "It allows for us to put all of this together and produce a compelling offering to address this class of need."
Ramakrishnan said there are a number of benchmarks on Exadata now available showing that tasks that used to take a couple of days are now getting done in 2 hours. A capital adequacy computation is one example. Another example is a liquidity stress test, he says, noting, "In aggregation, computation and results we can do that for 500 million cache flows associated with a very large size institution with more than 25 million customers and do that in half an hour."
According to Ramakrishnan, these are "unprecedented performance statements" that Oracle is now able to make by marrying its analytical applications technology with the data warehouse and Oracle's Exadata platform.
By presenting an increasingly unified and integrated stack and engineering it to work together, a class of problems that has been unsolvable in the industry now "is indeed solvable," S. Ramakrishnan says.