CIOIN

Oracle is offering a data warehouse tailored for the needs of the financial services industry, the company announced Thursday.

Financial services have found the process of setting up generic data warehouses difficult to complete, the company asserts. The new data warehouse package should eliminate a lot of the routine chores devoted to customizing data warehouses for the financial environment, according to Oracle.

With financial data warehouses, "the focus ... shifts from the indiscriminate, tedious capture and stewardship of all data, to the speed and specific context in which comprehensive decisions must now be made," said S. Ramakrishnan, group vice president and general manager of Oracle Financial Services Analytical Applications, in a statement.

With this package, a firm should be able to easily store financial data, generate reports, manage the metadata and carry out other routine financial functions, Oracle said.

The Oracle Financial Services Data Warehouse will be based on a financial services data model that Oracle has developed over the past 15 years, geared toward prepping data so that it can be used for customer analysis, compliance testing, reporting and risk analysis. The company offers about 30 financial applications that can work with this data model, including those that cover enterprise risk management, governance, risk, and compliance, enterprise performance management and customer insight.

The data warehouse is packaged as hardware with preinstalled Oracle financial software applications, databases and extract, transform, load (ETL) tools. The package offers users self-service style reporting and business intelligence tools. Third party analytics applications can be used to also analyze data from the warehouse. It has been customized so that it can easily be coupled with Oracle Exadata database servers.