In an interview, Frédéric Baeke, CRI’s Commercial Director since June 2011, explains how business intelligence (BI) is arming banks against the downturn and reveals how CRI Consultants operating in Luxembourg envisage the year 2012.
Content Studio: Given the current economic crisis, in what way is business intelligence playing a role for the banking sector?
Frédéric Baeke: It’s playing a crucial role in many ways. In general, BI aims to help businesses segment their customers, generate financial reports on the company’s activity and financial performance, help detect fraud ... plus help companies better manage and use the millions of data (non-structured records) they have accumulated over many years.
Obviously, in times of crisis, control of the information contained in databases is even more crucial. BI tools help create performance reports, margin analysis and daily dashboards that will inevitably serve as a basis for strategic decisions leading to companies’ businesses being refocused.
Content Studio: How are CRI’s Consultants helping the banking sector in providing the right solutions?
Frédéric Baeke: CRI’s Consultants are working at all levels of the business information chain: from understanding the businesses’ key requests to the technical development, including the creation or development of the required architecture. Our BI Consultants are able to work for any department, be it IT, human resources or marketing. In any case, we always make a point of combining business knowledge with technological expertise.
In this sense, what we sell is our consultants’ knowledge. We don’t sell software or tools, we only sell knowledge. This knowledge is based on the knowledge of the business of the bank — retail banking, private banking, corporate banking, every type the banking you can have, also administration of funds and so on.
On average, CRI Consultants have at least 10 years of experience. CRI currently has 14 Senior Consultants who have been in long-term working relationships with the biggest banks here in Luxembourg.
Content Studio: What is the outlook for the year 2012 for CRI’s BI customers and consultants?
Frédéric Baeke: The outlook for our customers is very clear: they will dramatically restrict the number of external resources. Now as we said, business intelligence is the way to help companies to face the crisis — it helps them to take the right decisions, to have the right information in the right moment, which is of course the goal.
Therefore, it is our opinion that in the BI sector, we will not feel a decrease in activity in 2012 and all our BI Consultants will have to work even harder to help our customers to make their business happen.
The current missions in the Luxembourg market are not at risk at all and we expect an increase in orders starting from the second quarter 2012. Meanwhile, we want to improve our market penetration by introducing new offers related to infrastructure systems thanks to our recently signed agreement with Huawei, the worldwide leading Chinese manufacturer.
I really think that despite of the financial euro crisis, 2012 will be a good year for CRI, and our budgets reflect my optimism since we forecast a global company growth of 25% compared to 2011.
This interview was conducted by Content Studio, CRI’s Editorial department.