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From 6 Hours to 10 Minutes
bank99 accelerates data availability
with Exasol and enables real-time reporting
Learn how bank99, together with Sphinx and Exasol, built a modern end-to-end data platform within a single year — laying the foundation for self-service analytics, near-real-time reporting, and the highest level of regulatory traceability.
- Complete banking DWH in just 1 year: Built an end-to-end data warehouse solution from the ground up – including historization, security, and a scalable architecture.
- Near-real-time reporting: Data is available for reporting and analysis in near real time, enabling faster, well-founded decisions.
- Self-service analytics & maximum traceability: Unified data models, fine-grained permissions, and the highest level of transparency meet the requirements of a modern bank.
Together, a completely new data warehouse platform was created that consolidates data from a wide range of source systems and makes it available for reporting, analytics, and future AI applications.
The bank99 customer success story is also available on the website of our technology partner Exasol.
Download the complete customer success story as a PDF
The following document contains the bank99 success story published together with our technology partner Exasol, in its original English version.
From 6 Hours to 10 Minutes
Bank99 accelerates data availability with Exasol and enables real-time reporting (pdf 3 MB)
Executive Summary
Founded in 2020, bank99 AG employs around 350 people and operates almost 1,800 branches across Austria as a subsidiary of Österreichische Post AG. Together with Exasol partner Sphinx IT Consulting, bank99 has consolidated its IT landscape into a powerful analytics platform based on Exasol and Sphinx IT Consulting’s RED framework. The daily load time for previous-day data has been reduced from 6 hours to less than 10 minutes. This lays the foundation for a sophisticated self-service BI concept with real-time reporting, which bank99 is currently implementing. Overall, decision-making has already improved significantly, delivering important competitive advantages.
- 50x faster data availability
- Real-time reporting instead of overnight loading cycles
- Future-proof architecture in the Azure Cloud
- Greater transparency and improved decision quality
- Historical data analysis for traceability, compliance, and advanced trend insights
“Data-driven decision-making is certainly an ambition of all financial institutions. Thanks to Exasol, we have been able to realize it – at least technically - within our organization.”
— Günther Balatka, Data Platform Owner, bank99
Company Profile
bank99 AG was founded in 2020 as a subsidiary of Österreichische Post AG. With around 350 employees, the bank operates a nationwide sales network of nearly 1,800 branches and postal partners across Austria. bank99 provides around 300,000 private customers with a comprehensive portfolio of financial services – from account management and payments to consumer loans, investments, savings products, mortgage financing, and insurance. At the same time, the bank is steadily expanding its corporate customer portfolio with the long-term vision of becoming an innovative, digital universal bank.
The Challenge
bank99’s history was shaped by the merger of two legacy banking systems – one for retail and one for business customers. The resulting heterogeneous IT landscape relied on a mix of SAS, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server.
This created several critical challenges:
- Excessive load times: Daily data loading took up to 6 hours, causing major delays in availability.
- Limited timeliness of analytics: Management and business teams had to work with previous-day data.
- Restricted self-service capability: Independent analytics were hardly possible due to complexity and performance issues.
- Rising digitalization pressure: bank99 wanted to modernize its processes to secure competitive advantages.
“Because two separate banking systems had evolved for retail and corporate clients, we wanted to consolidate the legacy platforms and were looking for a powerful database engine that could also meet future requirements.” – Günther Balatka, bank99
The Solution
Together with Exasol partner Sphinx IT Consulting , bank99 embarked on an ambitious transformation project:
- Consolidation of its IT landscape (SAS, Oracle DB, and Microsoft SQL Server “data lake”)
- Introduction of Exasol as a high-performance, scalable data warehouse
- Implementation of the RED framework — a metadata-driven ELT framework as the foundation for a central BI and reporting solution
- Integration of all relevant data sources into a unified architecture
- Development of a modern analytics platform in Microsoft Azure Cloud
Within just 12 months, the new platform was designed, implemented, and put into production. The goals: simplify data processes, enable self-service BI, and establish the foundation for real-time analytics.
The Results
RED-Framework
The RED framework is a metadata-based automation layer (“DWH as Code”) that dramatically accelerates data warehousing development by automating core tasks such as source integration, data historization based on source-system metadata, creation of semantic layers, and implementation of fine-grained security.
By simplifying technical complexity, RED enables rapid prototyping and iterative delivery of a complete data warehouse and reporting environment while minimizing operational overhead.
Our Customer's Voice
We immediately experienced a huge leap in processing performance compared to our old data warehouse. Loading daily business data used to take up to six hours every day. Today, it takes only six to ten minutes – about 50 times faster.
Video: „How bank99 Built a Fast, Self-Service Datawarehouse with Exasol""
Contact us
MAG. DR. THOMAS PETRIK
Managing Director
Head of Technology Consulting
Sphinx IT Consulting GmbH
+43 1 599 31 - 0
thomas.petrik@sphinx.at