Aptitude Software Delivers New Big Data Technology for Detailed Profitability Insight

Addressing many Chief Executives’ 2014 top priorities to achieve post-crisis growth targets, optimize profitability, improve strategic decision making, and increase control over costs – Aptitude Software has announced new big data technology to help enterprises unlock financial insight at levels of detail, flexibility and speed never previously possible.

One leading retail financial services firm, for example, is now able to calculate the cost to deliver and the profitability of brokerage services in less than five minutes, improving on the multiple days that it previously took to allocate and apportion costs across their portfolio of services. The ability to quickly and confidently extract these insights revolutionizes the team’s ability to optimize profitability on a daily basis.

In vertical industries from telecommunications to retail to financial services, other leading enterprises want to achieve better financial insight, but are often restricted by the massive volume and complexity of their data and now strive for new approaches.

Telecom operators, for example, want to calculate profitability of customers with different usage profiles and to make better decisions about how to price plans and where to invest in infrastructure. In many cases, operators also need better cost and profitability data to address regulatory reporting needs.

Retailers need to calculate and improve their direct product profitability by optimizing product assortment, mix, and pricing. Understanding how to reduce costs for logistics and store handling by changing product characteristics such as size and location also gives them a competitive edge.

Financial services firms need to understand the profitability to serve customers across multiple channels and markets to drive company strategy. Many banks are concerned with calculating the cost to service customers in the branch versus on-line to support the investment case for mobile banking.

Powering Big Data Financial Analytics for Profitability

Aptitude’s software combines with the IBM PureData System for Analytics, and together the technology is presented as the IBM PureData Solution for Profitability Insight.

The Profitability Insight solution enables CEOs, CFOs and other heads of business to rapidly calculate the profitability of an individual customer, product, price plan, investment, channel or any other dimension, using Big Data to unlock detailed financial insight. The solution processes billions of allocations per hour in order so that enterprises can calculate line-level profitability and rapidly iterate analysis to analyse profitability drivers.

Existing finance IT and ERP systems fail to serve these needs, as they typically use aggregate data and are geared towards serving statutory reporting needs, providing only a high level retrospective view on performance.

The Aptitude Allocation Engine provides business users with intuitive interfaces to set up multi-dimensional profitability calculations, reducing the dependence on IT specialists or specialist code-based tools. The software is optimized for the IBM PureData System for Analytics, which simplifies and maximises the performance of data services for analytic applications, enabling financial analyses to run in minutes, rather than hours.

The new Financial Analytics Market

"Many industries, from telecommunications to retail to financial services, are now characterized by a high volume of transactions, new business models for growth and massive data,” says Tom Crawford, President at Aptitude Software. "The ability to dynamically measure the true profitability of individual investments, products, customers, channels and offers in minutes, rather than in rigid overnight batch calculations, means teams can make better growth decisions and optimize profitability. Our new Profitability Insight product is designed to help enterprises unlock financial insight from big data and gain true competitive advantage.”

About Aptitude Software

Aptitude Software Limited is an enterprise software provider with expertise in helping large enterprises to achieve financial insight, control and transparency.

The company’s customers include many of the world’s leading firms across a range of industries. Uniquely, Aptitude Software combines finance domain expertise with a technology platform that is able to rapidly process massive amounts of data.

Aptitude Software is based in London & Boston, and is a Microgen plc (LSE: MCGN) company.

For more information about IBM Big Data and Analytics technologies, please visit www.ibm.com/bigdata.

Learn More

Boston Business Breakfast Roundtable

17 April 7:30am: Blue Inc. (Restaurant). 131 Broad Street Boston, MA 02110

IBM and Aptitude Software invite CFOs and executives from leading enterprises to contribute to a discussion on the challenges of extracting financial insights from the huge volume of data owned by large institutions. We will look at the various approaches being taken by those who are managing big data volumes to calculate line-level, near-real-time profitability. RSVP to info@aptitudesoftware.com

CFO.com Webcast: Charting a Course to Profitability with Big Data – Sponsored by IBM

Thursday 27 March 2014

Join us for a discussion about how CFOs and business leaders across industries are gaining near real-time insight into the true profitability of individual customers, service lines, products and customers – a ‘Holy Grail’ for modern enterprises who want to optimize profitability.

Register and replay available at: http://www.cfo.com/webcasts/index.cfm/l_eventdetail?webcast=14706182&pcode=IBM031314_b

Webinar with Forrester Research - "Financial Performance Management in the Age of Big Data”

25 February 1600 (GMT), 1100 NY (EST)

The online webinar will feature senior Forrester Research analyst George Lawrie and review how leading enterprises are facing the challenge of measuring and optimizing line-level profitability. Join peers from industry to discuss how the Big Data and other technologies are being used by finance and business leaders to improve strategic decision making.

Replay available here: http://www.microgen.com/uk-en/enquiry-form/webinar-finance-performance-management-age-big-data

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Aptitude - European & U.S. Patents Pending (for more information please refer to our website: http://www.microgen.com/patentsandtrademarks)