Fund managers are relying on business intelligence software to sift through reams of data in order to tune their marketing and distribution strategies.

Swedbank Robur, Scandinavia’s largest fund management group with over US $100 billion in assets under management, is employing Sales Navigator from Graz Sweden, a data warehouse provider for the financial industry, to make critical tactical and strategic decisions.

Sales Navigator is a business intelligence module for Hinc, Graz Sweden’s flagship data warehousing system, which Swedbank Robur has been using for years to market its 130 funds through more than 80 banks and 4 million clients.

“We had a very challenging situation with millions of customers and a very complex distribution organization,” said Morgan Andersson, head of sales management at Swedbank Robur. “Thanks to Hinc, we now have the visibility we need to drive improvements to our marketing strategies and product development processes.”

Notwithstanding its vast distribution network and a complex organizational structure, Swedbank Robur maintains complete control over its data via a single instance of SQL Server. Sales Navigator provides the added ability to analyze historical and real-time sales and profitability data, while taking into consideration such factors as cost, rebates and fees.

“For years, Swedbank Robur has utilized our data warehouse technology to improve operational efficiencies and lower operational risks and costs,” said Jonas Olsson, CEO of Graz. “Graz’s business intelligence answers an asset manager’s most critical questions in real-time: Who is selling what to whom? How and when are they selling it, what is the profitability of every fund, channel, agent?”

Date warehousing needs to be optimized for financial firms, says Olsson.

“Reporting and business intelligence is only as good as your data, and Graz’s Hinc is the only data warehouse with a physical data model capable of integrating the diverse data that a financial services company generates,” he said. “We make it easy for our customers to tap into data from portfolio management systems, order management systems, custody systems, unit ledger systems, fund data, benchmarks.”

“What is most challenging when architecting a data warehouse is not the amount of data stored but rather the complexity of the data and whether the data can be easily accessed,” said Vincent Fily, worldwide capital markets technology strategist at Microsoft Corp. “Hinc, based on SQL Server, provides financial institutions with an integrated, cost-effective platform to obtain deep business insight to meet the evolving needs of their business.”

Added Olsson, “Unlike SAS, Oracle and SAP, we do not transform data prior to storing it. This allows our customers to go back and always be able to retrace how they arrived at something – which sources were utilized, how data was prioritized. This also means that once data is stored, it can serve any application at any time – whether for business intelligence or some other objective. There’s no need to change the underlying data with each new effort.”