Karnataka Bank unlocks transformation using Amazon QuickSight as an enterprise business intelligence tool

Karnataka Bank is a leading commercial bank in India that offers personal, non-residential Indian (NRI) business and agriculture banking services. It operates over 900 branches and serves more than 13 million customers. In this post, Karnataka Bank shares how they moved from legacy reporting systems to Amazon QuickSight enterprise business intelligence.

At Karnataka, we’ve been profitable since our inception in 1924 and to continue to do so, we’re undergoing significant culture and operational transformation to meet the future. Our goal is to transform into a more entrepreneurial, startup-like organization to scale more efficiently and deliver on the evolving needs of our customers.

As part of this transformation, we needed a more sophisticated business intelligence tool that would allow us to analyze the performance of every branch and manage their campaigns.

We also needed a tool that could integrate data sources, such as online banking and digital touchpoints, to create 360-degree views of each customer and make that profile immediately accessible to each branch.

The Customer 360 overview dashboard (shown in the preceding figure) provides a comprehensive view of our customers by consolidating key information into a single, user-friendly interface. It displays detailed demographics, asset and liability holdings, and significant debit and credit transactions. Additionally, it offers valuable insights into spending patterns and balances, including month-end and average monthly balances. This holistic view helps our employees evaluate the overall value of each customer and make informed decisions.

Why QuickSight?

Previously, we mostly used Excel to report on business, which introduced unnecessary security risks and didn’t meet the needs of our users for quick, integrated, secure data.

After evaluating other business intelligence tools, QuickSight stood out as a fully managed, cost-effective solution with features that satisfied our needs:

1. Affordable and flexible pricing: QuickSight offers a flexible pay-as-you-use pricing model, which means we can offer branch managers, cluster heads, and regional heads access without having to pay expensive upfront licensing costs.
2. Native integration: QuickSight seamlessly integrates various data sources such as data lakes in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and our on-premises Active Directory (AD) for authentication, speeding up dashboard development and reducing manual work.
3. Robust, enterprise-grade security: Single sign-on through QuickSight integrates with on-premises directories. IP-based restriction also bolsters security measures, and multi-factor authentication support provides additional security for admin users. The bank has also configured the role-based access to enable the branch managers to access their respective data with hierarchical controls.
4. Enterprise level scaling: QuickSight scales to the enterprise demands even during peak load workloads leading to better analysis.
5. Comprehensive enablement and constant AWS support: Amazon Web Services (AWS) teams engaged the bank stakeholders through workshops, immersion days, and demos to showcase the art of the possible in QuickSight. AWS solution architects and AWS support were available to aid and guide the team during any incidents.

The seamless integration of an enterprise business intelligence tool fit for transformation

We deployed the main dashboards in QuickSight in about four months, adding enhancements along the way to suit our use cases, which are:

• Visualize and analyze branch productivity and sales
• See overall productivity of the business
• Improve campaign management, non-performing assets, and collections monitoring
• Gain a comprehensive customer 360-degree view

We use AWS Glue to automate data preparation, ensuring our data is clean, enriched, and ready for analysis. Amazon Athena allows us to run queries directly on our data stored in Amazon S3, transforming it into a format suitable for analysis without needing complex data warehousing solutions.

QuickSight provides enterprise business intelligence fit for modern banking

As we became more entrepreneurial, it became clear that we required better, more sophisticated insights into how our many branches were performing.

Excel sheets were difficult to update, almost impossible to scale, and not secure enough for our business. We needed an enterprise business intelligence tool that could scale to the entire enterprise and securely integrate with our directory service.

Migrating to QuickSight provided us with comprehensive and insightful metrics showing performance, including the productivity and sales numbers of each branch.

This meant that we could easily identify the branches that were underperforming and take proactive measures.

The Branch Productivity Dashboard (shown in the preceding figure) offers insights into the performance of each branch concerning current account savings account (CASA), deposits, and advances. It displays whether branches have met their targets and includes various views tailored for region heads, cluster heads, and branch heads. Additionally, the dashboard provides a summarized overview of the micro market.

The CASA Balance Buildup Dashboard (shown in the preceding figure) offers comprehensive insights into the total number of accounts and customers, including both active and dormant accounts, categorized by region. This dashboard allows employees to gain a clear view of the current performance of CASA accounts and provides information on the number of existing (ETB) and new-to-bank (NTB) customers.

Sophisticated dashboards for non-performing assets and collections monitoring also allowed us to see status in real-time so we could deliver more accurate insights to our workers.

We’re also able to use concurrency scaling. The QuickSight SPICE (Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine) allows us to handle multiple simultaneous queries from different users without compromising performance. This capability is essential for a bank of our size, enabling fast, interactive analysis across a wide variety of data sources.

Robust security and accessibility at the heart of success

We have significantly improved our security measures by adopting QuickSight as our enterprise business intelligence tool. Our previous reliance on Excel documents for reporting posed challenges in terms of security. With QuickSight, we addressed these issues by using its secure platform for enterprise-wide analytics.

Secure integration and access

QuickSight integrates seamlessly with our existing directory services, ensuring that only authorized users can access sensitive data. Our users sign in through a single sign-on integrated with our on-premises directory, which streamlines authentication and enhances security.

Advanced security features

We benefit from the IP-based restrictions and multi-factor authentication for admin users supported by QuickSight. These features provide an additional verification step to reduce the risk of unauthorized access.

Enterprise-grade security compliance

With QuickSight, we have a managed business intelligence platform that meets the strict security standards essential for the banking industry. This gives us confidence that our sensitive information is protected while providing secure access to business intelligence insights across our branches and regions.

QuickSight enhances the banking customer experience

With QuickSight, we can easily visualize individual customer profiles in one place.

Having a comprehensive 360-degree customer view gives us better insights into their wants and needs, so we can significantly improve digital and in-branch experiences.

After implementation, we saw the following improvements:

• Bank could garner around more than 100 Crore INR (1000 Million INR) business addition through analytical interventions provided by AWS based analytics platform and Amazon QuickSight, which is expected to grow as adoption to initiatives increases.
• Amazon QuickSight based reports and dashboards has played key role in improving the collections rate, targeted marketing campaigns, cross-selling, and upselling initiatives.
• Amazon QuickSight based reports and dashboards cover the core six groups including assets, liabilities, third-party providers (TPP), collections, risk, and operations.
• The bank has built a next generation, future proof cloud platform for analytical initiatives.
• Customer contact rates have increased.
• Customer conversion rates have increased.
• More sophisticated real-time customer insights.

The automated teller machine (ATM) Dashboard (shown in the preceding figure) provides comprehensive insights into the ATM and bunch note acceptor (BNA) machines operated by Karnataka Bank. It features detailed information on the distribution of machines across different regions, tracks the downtime for each machine, and monitors withdrawals by region. Additionally, the dashboard offers data on branch transactions and customer transactions, including the total number of active Karnataka Bank Limited (KBL) customers. With a total of six tabs, the dashboard serves as a versatile tool for analyzing various aspects of ATM and banking operations.

What’s next

We’re experimenting with enabling our stakeholders by providing them with a feature to explore and get insights from data using natural language queries. For instance, a senior leader of the bank can use a one-time query to get a report on a specific branch’s performance using Amazon Q. For this use case, we’re planning to explore Amazon Q in QuickSight. We think this will help our team to access data faster to accelerate decision making. Because Amazon Q provides role-based access, we can securely enable this feature for our users.

Get started with Amazon QuickSight

We encourage you to level up your business intelligence with QuickSight. Try a free trial to see how you can use QuickSight to productize data and analytics.

About the Authors

Mr. Pankaj Gupta is the Chief Digital & Marketing Officer at Karnataka Bank, where he has built relevant digital and analytical solutions that deliver reduction in operational cost & risk, increase in yield & CSAT, and accelerate quality growth. He also drives digital marketing initiatives for the Bank. Previously, he served various leadership roles at Wipro Infotech and Sify Technologies Ltd.

Mr. Pradeep Rao U is a Deputy General Manager at Karnataka Bank. Pradeep has over 25 years of experience at the Bank. Previously, worked across departments including Information Technology, MIS, and New Business Development, where he handled various responsibilities including infrastructure requirements, management & regulatory reporting requirements, and new products & processes to increase business & efficiency. He is presently working in the Analytical Centre of Excellence driving analytical initiatives for the Bank.

Mr. Guruprasad M is a Chief Manager at Karnataka Bank. Guruprasad has over 15 years of experience at the Bank. Previously, he worked across the Information Technology Department and MIS department, where he handled Oracle databases, applications, regulatory reporting and audit. He is currently working in the Analytical Centre of Excellence as a Data Engineer handling data pipeline to cloud infrastructure.

Shailesh Shivakumar is an FSI Sr. Solutions Architect with AWS India. He works with financial enterprises including banks, NBFCs, and trading enterprises to help design secure cloud platforms and accelerate their cloud journeys. He leads other initiatives such as customer enablement workshops, AWS Demos, proofs of concepts, cost optimization, and solution assessment to ensure AWS customers succeed in their cloud journey. Shailesh has key areas of interest in security, serverless, containers, Generative AI, and Machine Learning on cloud.

Sudhanshu Ghai is an FSI Account Manager with AWS India. He works with banks and other financial services firms to adopt the AWS cloud and scale their businesses.

Sundar Sankaranarayanan is an Analytics Specialist with experience in driving adoption of modern data architectures, enterprise data lakehouses, and real-time data systems across the financial services and SaaS industries.

Avaanticka Narayan is an Analytics Specialist who spent over 17 years of experience in presales, solutions consulting, and business development within the realm of business intelligence and analytics. Throughout her career, she has diligently served various industry verticals, aiding clients in defining comprehensive analytics strategies. With a fervent dedication, Avaanticka eagerly imparts her expertise to the community, exuding passion and energy in her endeavors.