Online Credit Checks at RLB NÖ-Wien AG – to the First Real-Time Analysis in Just 8 Months

About this project

Find out how RLB Niederösterreich-Wien AG, together with Exasol and Sphinx, built a high-performance analytics platform in just 8 months as part of the BISON project (Business Intelligence Space Online) – from a high-performance data foundation to the successful implementation of complex analytics and reporting requirements.

While our partner Exasol supplied the technological foundation for fast data analysis with its high-performance analytics database, Sphinx was responsible for the design, implementation, and integration of the analytics solution. Together, a powerful platform emerged that today supports data-driven decisions.

Below, we present the project in detail.
Read the success story

Online Credit Checks with Exasol – RLB Niederösterreich-Wien AG's First Real-Time BI Analysis

Starting with online credit checks for new customers, Raiffeisenlandesbank Niederösterreich-Wien AG (RLB) is progressively expanding its capabilities for real-time queries and analytics. Thanks to its decision in favor of Exasol, the bank now has an infrastructure that prepares it for future analytics requirements.

• The challenge: Real-time online analysis wasn't achievable with the existing technology.
• The solution: Introducing Exasol as the foundation for real-time analytics with BISON – RLB's new Business Intelligence Space Online.
• The benefit: Efficient implementation of business functionality and top performance, alongside significant cost savings.

Exasol demonstrated its strengths compared to competitors as early as the PoC stage: performance and low maintenance. During deployment – which went completely smoothly thanks to Sphinx's rollout methodology and ELT framework – the decision proved to be the right one. The system was up and running in just eight months. After successfully implementing the credit-worthiness check, further use cases were quickly tackled.

• 2 to 10x higher performance in the PoC, depending on system and use case.
• 150x faster for individual queries compared to SQL-based approaches.
• 8 months to launch, ensuring a cost-effective start for the new platform.

The Challenge

Digitalization in the financial sector is increasingly shifting work processes from bank branches to the internet. Prospective bank customers should be able to apply for consumer credit online, with the entire credit processing procedure – through to approval – completed without a branch visit. If the customer enters all the necessary data and agrees to its online analysis, the entire application process, including the credit-worthiness check, can run automatically. However, this requires a high-performance infrastructure for the necessary analyses, for example to carry out the credit-worthiness check in real time.

RLB's existing data warehouse architecture and the solutions built on it were tailored to various legacy applications that had grown over time. However, they are not suited to the growing digitalization and analytics demands of the highly dynamic financial sector, since OLTP- and SQL-based systems simply cannot deliver the necessary performance.

The Solution

When it comes to real-time analysis, OLTP- and SQL-based systems reach the limits of their capability. Searching for a high-performance analytics infrastructure to meet the growing demand for online analysis, RLB ran a four-month PoC with several vendors and chose Exasol as its platform. BISON – Business Intelligence Space Online – based on Exasol, was introduced and developed together with Sphinx IT Consulting in record time, running in parallel to the existing data warehouse, and is becoming the bank's central query system.

In the PoC comparing various in-memory databases with MPP architecture, Exasol impressed not just with top performance – the analytics-specialized database was ahead by a factor of at least 2 in every use case. Being able to forgo the core layer in the data warehouse and create project sandboxes to evaluate new user requirements simplifies building new queries. All of the bank's operational requirements were met as well. Once embedded into the company's infrastructure – including backup and recovery processes – the appliance is virtually maintenance-free, aside from two updates per year. Self-tuning ensures ongoing optimization, and data center operations continue essentially unaffected.

BISON's launch in under 8 months was made possible in part by Sphinx's highly pragmatic rollout methodology and its ETL framework. BISON was set up in parallel to the existing data warehouse, which remains centrally important as the „single point of truth“ for internal bank reporting and regulatory filing obligations. It was connected as the primary source „as is“, with the extracted data fully historized in BISON.

„We run many systems and are gradually consolidating them on the data side. Our new analytics environment is evolving toward a central platform for queries – the future of our query systems lies with Exasol.“ reports Sinan Kaya, Head of IT Enterprise Architecture at Raiffeisenlandesbank Niederösterreich-Wien AG.

After consolidation and standardization, a historized, stable staging layer was available, on which the application marts for queries are built directly. This two-tier architecture is possible because, even with view hierarchies of complex logic, sufficient performance remains available for the top view. This not only saves on data volume but also reduces license costs accordingly.

Thanks to the new project sandboxes, the backlog of analytics requests at RLB has also decreased. Key users in the business departments use the isolated area to simulate new analytics questions. Instead of drafting business requirement documents – which repeatedly led to misunderstandings – successfully tested queries are handed over to IT and implemented according to standards. This results in greater departmental autonomy without sprawl, which everyone involved appreciates.

The „credit-worthiness check“ use case was the impetus for future-proofing the BISON query platform with a new data management infrastructure. Since Exasol went live, numerous further use cases have been added, confirming that RLB made the right decision for the future with Exasol as an acceleration layer for online query systems.