Cognos launches its Customer Segment Performance Blueprint for the banking industry and builds on its alliance with Acorn Systems. Cognos, a software company that specializes in business intelligence and performance planning, announced in a statement Nov. 6 the release of Cognos Customer Segment Performance Blueprint, designed to help retail and corporate banks turn profits for their customers.
Available in two versions, one designed for corporate banking and the other for retail banks, the Cognos Customer Segment Performance Blueprint will allow managers to look into their customer information and develop intelligence on customer behavior, research revenue streams and profitability, and then use this information to focus, plan and measure new sales to help improve their customer bases and keep customers satisfied.
Laurence Trigwell, senior financial services industry director for Cognos, based in Burlington, Mass., told eWEEK, "The Customer Segment Performance Blueprints for Retail and Corporate Banks help them to align their target-setting process for customer segments or individual customers with their actual performance at the account, regional and business unit level."
The Cognos Customer Segment Performance Blueprint features dashboards and reports for tracking customer performance; profit and loss statements; and new capabilities for customer segmentation, all of which are developed through Acorn Systems Performance Analyzer Application, which appoints general ledger costs, revenues and resources through business processes to verify the cost and profitability of customers, segments, channels, branches and transactions, based upon past performance.
In December of 2004, Acorn Systems and Cognos announced a global alliance to deliver comprehensive activity-based costing and corporate performance management planning for corporate and retail banks.
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Gaurav Verma, financial services industry director for Cognos, told eWEEK that the partnership has been beneficial to both companies.
"In addition to this Blueprint, Acorn also provides the activity-based costing element behind our first Financial Service Blueprint—Cognos Branch Performance—which we released in April 2006. Beyond these applications, Cognos and Acorn are currently engaged in several customer opportunities across North America and Latin America, where the opportunity exists to align our performance management solutions with Acorns ABC platform," Verma said.
Chris D. Fraga, chief strategy office at Acorn Systems, said in a statement, "The integration of Acorns accurate content with Cognos Planning and BI combines all the right ingredients to enable companies to make better business decisions from a profit perspective."
Verma told eWEEK that the Acorn software does not come bundled with the Cognos Customer Segment Performance Blueprints for Retail and Corporate Banks and that the users have to buy and apply it independently.
"Integration with Acorn Systems activity-based management software helps give banks greater confidence in their numbers, which will allow them to spend less time on calculations and instead focus on delivering the right products at the right time to targeted customers in order to drive profitable growth," Verma said.
Both the corporate and retail versions of the Cognos Customer Segment Performance Blueprint are available free of charge to Cognos customers.
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