During our Cloud portion of Preview Day, we got an opportunity to meet with Andrew Boucher, VP – Market Risk Management at Western Alliance Bancorporation. With more than $20 billion in assets, Western Alliance is one of the top-performing finance giants, ranking #2 on Forbes’ list of “Best Banks in America.”

Their national expansion prompted a need for applied technologies that could manage performance and risk with ease. Western Alliance consolidated three bank charters in December of 2013. Reporting requirements changed to a more regional reporting structure, which demanded a different tool. Their on-premises software wasn’t cutting it anymore.

First, the bank purchased a non-Oracle based general ledger (GL) package. Most people involved with the tool found it suboptimal, to say the least, because it was hard to manage. Eventually, the bank needed something that could do even more, and they found those capabilities in Oracle PBCS (Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service). Here are just a few of the planning and budgeting perks that Boucher mentioned:

• Security
• Reliability
• Scalability
• Easy collection of disparate information
• Data can be organized and integrated easily
• Cubes for subcategories of expense management
• No need for CAPEX (capital expenditure) infrastructure investment

PBCS, while a great start for Western Alliance, lacked the more complex analytics tool that Western Alliance needed. BICS (Business Intelligence Cloud Service) features data modeling capabilities that organize and integrate data — even for disparate data that was previously difficult to collect within the on-premises environment.

Let’s look now at what BICS can do for banks and other companies:

• Gathering info and analyzing useful information within a short time
• Organizing and integrating data from various sources
• Reporting and dashboarding
• Analyzing data and displaying through striking visualizations

So far, upper management within Western Alliance has given high praise for what BICS has provided the business, mostly due to the overwhelming amount of information it can handle while providing flexibility, quick results and peace of mind. “[BICS] has opened our eyes to the capabilities of business intelligence,” says Boucher.

For more unique insight about Cloud applications and how they can help businesses like yours, look at our roundup of education from COLLABORATE 18 Preview Day. We have Cloud webinar videos for you to watch; you can find the recordings by selecting Cloud under the Preview Day tabs and following the “View Recording” buttons to the right of the webinar descriptions.

To get even more insight on navigating the Oracle Cloud journey, you won’t want to miss COLLABORATE 18, April 22 -26. Register before March 8 to save up to 40 percent! Stay up to date with the latest conference news by following @QuestUserGroup on Twitter and look for the official COLLABORATE 18 hashtag, #C18LV!

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