iCreate: Delivering Banking 'Intellisense' Date:   Thursday , July 01, 2010 Kuwait based National Bank of Kuwait (NBK) was scouting for a Business Intelligence (BI) solution to be incorporated in their core banking system. It was a significant move and the modern day necessity for NBK when they decided to deploy next generation BI solutions. Thanks to iCreate Software, an India based BI solutions specialist, whose expertise in the space and more importantly in core banking systems, helped NBK to form and rollout the BI strategy as per the growing requirements of the Bank. The deployment helped the Bank to stay abreast of the modern trends in the highly competitive market and also to tackle the challenges posed by Bank's fast paced growth. "The decision to collaborate with iCreate was an important turning point for NBK's IT strategy. iCreate was chosen because it had knowledge and experience in the core banking system space, especially in the emerging market context," says Hani Khalil, Enterprise Architect for NBK's IT division, which indeed validates iCreate's expertise in the space. As the challenges for banks and financial institutions are becoming increasingly competitive and demanding in global marketplace, one need to understand its existing customer base more so banks can offer extra value addition to its customers, which eventually result in increased business gains for the Bank itself. Hence it becomes imperative at such times to extract rich, actionable information from one’s own Core Banking systems, which are a goldmine of business-critical data. Says Vivek Subramanyam, CEO of iCreate, "Normally these are the data that, often sit in underlying tables and databases unutilized, which if used in a right manner and in the right context, can drive management decisions with far-reaching consequences." With iCreate's solution, banks can transfer raw, unprocessed data into useful information that helps them to propel far beyond the competition. iCreate helps the banks to automate this whole process by helping them to process their idle data sitting in silos. Close to Readymade Solutions Interestingly, iCreate's 'close to readymade' solutions can customize according to the need of clients. "We don't have to go and develop solution when the clients approach, just need to customize our product by connecting our system to customer’s system," says Subramanyam. He also adds that their offering is unique in terms of solution and price. "Clients don’t have to buy any other tools, they don’t have to pay for system integrators, and they just need to buy the solution. All requirements are incorporated as a package and so it significantly reduces the price," he adds. iCreate's deep expertise and understanding of the processes in banking and industry leading core banking systems and standard BI technologies has helped them to win significant customers globally. Today they have some big names like the South African Bank of Athens, Capitec Bank of South Africa and National bank of Greece as their key customers. "Our uniqueness is our sense of the need for solutions that deliver context-specific banking intelligence cost effectively and in the shortest possible time," informs Subramanyam. Today iCreate provides solutions namely Biz$core, Biz$Manage and DEED Workshop to help the banks to make better decisions, minimize risk while complying with global regulatory requirements. Recently IDG Ventures has invested Rs.15 crore in iCreate. "The shared conviction we have around the potential for domain-centric BI solutions was what endeared IDG to us as our investor of choice," says Subramanyam. Going forward, the company is expecting 100 percent growth in revenue year-on-year and also the firm is keen on increasing the employee strength, which is now around 100. The growth strategy also includes building a global sales platform, increasing marketing efforts and continuing investment in product development. With all strategies being decided and set, indeed iCreate is on its way to realize its dream of becoming the best among the BI solutions providers from India.