A Margin Planning Solution That Works: A Regional Bank Case Study

The CFO of a southern US retail bank was frustrated. As the pandemic slammed everyone – it hit retail banks especially hard. Our client’s CFO could not coordinate his team fast enough to revise business plans quickly enough to keep up with changing business conditions.

His team needed to refresh plans daily as the pandemic swung business back & forth over the past 3 years:

• Customer visits kept fluctuating as branches locked and opened.
• The Fed cut interest rates to 0 and then raised them to >5%.
• Inflation surged, driving up labor and operating costs.
• They were missing out on new business as many customers received stimulus checks, but they were not marketing to capture the new business.

The old way of forecasting using email and spreadsheets was not working.

Each time a new wrinkle hit their business, the CFO ran around trying to coordinate stakeholders from the branch managers on up, to reset their business plans.  After a few months, he realized he needed a system and a prescriptive business process to pull these threads together so the team could reset their business plan in hours versus weeks.

Our retail banking client’s CFO needed an effective solution fast…he needed a game changer.

He heard about Alithya’s Bank Margin Planning and asked Alithya to deploy it immediately (in a few weeks). Alithya’s Bank Margin Planning gave the CFO and his team a cloud-centric, real-time planning, budgeting, and forecasting solution that connected the C-suite, finance, and the branches together: a common playbook and a shared system.

Alithya's Accelerator Transformed Business Planning

The CFO chose Oracle’s Enterprise Performance Management and activated Alithya’s Bank Margin Planning accelerator.

The CFO is psyched. It takes a fraction of the time for branch managers and FP&A Analysts to adjust to changing business conditions and create actionable business plans.

With Alithya’s Bank Margin Planning:

• The CFO can set top-down targets for new business volumes, revenue, and margin.
• FP&A can test economic assumptions like interest rates.
• Branch managers can model their book of business by planning new customer account openings and promotions like “get a toaster with a new account” (well, in today’s world, more like get a “$100 if you open a new account.”).

And, by building the solution with Oracle’s Enterprise Performance Management Cloud, the bank gets a modern platform to:

• Visualize results with comprehensive reporting and metrics for executives, managers, and planners.
• Analyze performance at a glance with charts that display period-over-period performance across product lines to determine where and when to act.
• Better understand balances of deposits and loans to calculate net interest margin and non-interest expense and income.
• Enable the treasury department to react to the plan and forecast quickly.
• Understand the impact of factors including changes in prepayment speeds, runoff or business sold, existing or new deposits, and anticipated loans.
• Spread the impact of market changes over the course of a year, helping to better understand the current and future impact.
• Quickly adapt plans and forecasts based on ever-changing market factors and macroeconomic variables.
• The agility to baseline and analyze factors that may cause a material impact.

To learn more, visit our Bank Margin Planning webpage or download our ebook Five Ways for Banks to Improve Margin Planning. 

For comments, questions, or suggestions for future topics, please reach out to us at infosolutions@alithya.com.  Visit our blog regularly for new posts about Cloud updates and other Oracle Cloud Services such as Planning and Budgeting, Financial Consolidation, Account Reconciliation, and Enterprise Data Management.  Follow Alithya on social media for the latest information about EPM, ERP, HCM, and Analytics solutions to meet your business needs.