Informatica Perspectives

While the market is showing signs of recovery from the "Great Recession" most state budgets have been feeling the squeeze from the lag in recovery. In a recent article titled The Sorry State of Finances, Liam Denning explained that, "55% of state revenue, before federal transfers, comes from personal and corporate income tax." Denning also stated that, "the first three quarters of 2009 were the worst for state tax since at least 1963."

There is an apparent lag between recovery in the private sector and a state receiving tax revenue. So what can states do about this problem while they suffer in the red? Mr. Denning said, "Since states can't run general funding deficits, closing gaps mean raising taxes, cutting services and resorting to one-time measures." Mr. Denning's list of solutions is certainly accurate, but does it include all options that states have? What about employing new technology to discover fraud or recover uncollected revenue? [Read more]

The only way for HealthDetail to hold or increase margins was to think differently. The company’s provider directory business supplies accurate and compliant healthcare directories for Medicaid and other health insurers. The problem was that the volume of data coming in and the breadth of different sources it was derived from threatened to overwhelm the existing database. HealthDetail could either invest in dedicated database administration resources, at great expense, or consider a more innovative solution: cloud-based data integration.

[Read more]

According to a recent FT.com article, US lawmakers are seeking to expand the reach of anti-money laundering regulations after a Senate investigation found that hundreds of millions of dollars in suspect foreign funds have been able to land in the US. As we can see, money laundering and terroristic financing continues to rise despite the huge investments banks have made in packaged Anti-Money Laundering (AML) software, custom built solutions through global system integrators, re-engineered business process, people, and policies.  How can this be? Were these bad investments to begin with or is there something else causes these issues? [Read more]

Komerční banka.

Fresh off a flight from London, Dave Schrader, our friend from Teradata, alerted me that our joint Teradata-Informatica customer, Komerční banka, a Société Générale bank, won the prestigious, EMEA Business Intelligence Award 2010 at Gartner Business Intelligence Summit!

In their press release,
http://www.kb.cz/en/com/press/releases/781.shtml

Pavel Čejka, Komerční banka Executive Director, Strategy and Finance, comments on the great benefits of BI: "I believe that one of the strengths of financial management at KB is the existence of a unified database and performance indicators, which are interconnected and focused not only on financial data, which I consider to be a matter of course, but also on business, product, risk, operating and other information."

Teradata and Informatica were highlighted as part of the first-class technologies in the project. It involved the implementation of user metadata and an information quality program. [Read more]

Back in June 2009, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) published Financial Accounting Statements No. 166, Accounting for Transfers of Financial Assets, and No. 167, Amendments to FASB Interpretation No. 46(R), which changes the way entities account for securitizations and special-purpose entities. The new standards will impact financial institution balance sheets beginning in 2010 and will require substantive changes to how banks account for many items, including securitized assets that had been previously excluded from these organizations' balance sheets. Banks affected by the new accounting standards will be subject to higher risk-based regulatory capital requirements. So what does it all mean and how much will it cost banks to comply?  [Read more]