CARE Risk Solutions is a multinational company that provides a comprehensive suite of risk management solutions for the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) sectors.
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The Challenge
With their customers running on Oracle Exadata databases, CARE Risk Solutions was battling against performance and scale issues. They needed to find a database that could handle the complex reporting, size, and expectations of their large financial services clients. They also needed to migrate their entire product portfolio (including multiple interconnected modules) from Oracle.
The Solution
With the help of Chemtrols Infotech, CARE Risk Solutions migrated their entire portfolio of products to EDB and achieved a 30 percent improvement in transaction processing. With EDB, they not only addressed the shortcomings of the prior database, but also were able to pursue and sign prospective customers previously considered too large to perform effectively.
The Results
- 3 new clients added due to the migration to EDB
- 49% reduction in report generation time
- 30% improvement in transaction processing
- Easy migration from legacy database to EDB
A Legacy, Proprietary Database Fails to Meet Expectations
Customers of CARE Risk Solutions rely heavily on its products to help them calculate risk, manage liabilities, and report on profitability, as well as produce regular reports as required by governmental regulations.
As part of its product suite, CARE Risk offers a CFO-focused solution called Kalypto / FTP, which banks use to measure and report on profitability. The application measures and calculates the profitability of every customer, evaluating each and every transaction, from depositing and withdrawing money to more complex interactions around loans and a bank’s other lines of business. As a result, the FTP application has to manage a huge amount of volume, all of which must be calculated as part of its analysis.
One of CARE Risk’s biggest customers is a large, public sector bank that needs to conform to strict guidelines by producing and submitting regular profitability reports to the government. However, that regulatory reporting had become a source of intense frustration. The complex report involved hundreds of millions of records, calculating against every customer transaction in the timeframe, cross-referenced against hundreds of branch locations, and associated with hundreds of General Ledger headers.
In short, it was a massive report that took the bank’s Oracle Exadata database nearly 177 hours to produce every single time, and sometimes couldn’t be generated at all. As a result, the bank repeatedly missed its regulatory reporting deadlines.
Those same performance challenges weren’t unique to one customer either – CARE Risk found themselves limited in the institutions they could pursue for new opportunities due to concerns about whether the legacy database could support such complexity and its performance requirements.
Amarjeet Tiwari, Director of Technology and Innovations at CARE Risk Solutions, recalls, “We realized that all our problems were driven by multiple bottlenecks at the database level. Every run had a temp tables space issue. We had 2 terabytes available for the temp table, and it still wasn’t enough to complete the process and generate the report.”
The problem was further compounded by Oracle’s inability to resolve the issue. Gaining technical support was a nightmare, and after months of trying to work with the vendor, the CARE Risk team realized that it needed to replace its existing database. The new database would need to support not only this customer’s use case, but the needs of even larger banks and institutions as well as CARE Risk looked to continue expanding up market.
EDB Supercharges PostgreSQL, Boosting Performance
In determining which databases to consider, the CARE Risk Solutions team focused on open source databases. Several members of the team previously had positive experiences running heavy volume on PostgreSQL for other projects.
“Postgres has shown itself to be more stable and more secure than proprietary databases,” explained Tiwari. “At my last company, we used Postgres for our remittance platform, and I had such a good association and impression that Postgres was at the top of my list for consideration. We looked at EDB because it comes with the beauty of an open source database and the licensing capacity that ensures somebody is there if you run across any kind of a problem.”
As part of its thorough evaluation process, the team sought to validate the performance with a similar workload as had initiated their search for a new database. Choosing a capable and flexible services partner, Chemtrols Infotech, was also key to their success.
Mr. Tiwari continued, “During our in-house test of EDB, we saw more than a 30 percent improvement in transaction processing as compared to our previous database. On one troublesome workload, we reduced report generation time from 177 hours to approximately 90 hours without needing to make any changes besides the database migration and merging the number of ledger heads.”
Migration to PostgreSQL Leads to Key Customer Wins
Satisfied with their results, the CARE Risk Solutions team elected to migrate their entire suite of risk management applications onto EDB. Given the scope of the project, they worked with EDB partner Chemtrols Infotech for the migration work.
The Chemtrols Infotech team developed and implemented the appropriate methodology and detailed migration plan. With the Chemtrols and CARE Risk teams working in tandem, the entire migration of the CARE Risk product portfolio took just 90 days, due in large part to Chemtrols’ extensive experience and EDB’s automated migration tool kit. The migrated product suites had undergone comprehensive testing with multiple customer data sets, and the results exceeded the benchmark figures of the previous Oracle environment.
The migration to EDB proved to be an excellent strategic decision as well. Following the initial tests, CARE Risk Solutions realized that the improvements that EDB delivered allowed the company to pursue larger customers that were previously seen as out of reach.
In particular, the team targeted some of the Indian Financial Institutes, which have much larger portfolios and volumes than the banks already using the CARE Risk products. Based on the strength of the CARE Risk product portfolio supported by EDB, CARE Risk became the enterprise risk partner for one of India’s largest Financial Institutes.
“As a direct result of migrating to EDB, we were able to close three new customers,” Mr. Tiwari explained. “We increased our revenue as well as our benefits. With EDB, we get three big benefits: a best-in-class model of support, good documentation and training materials, and a ‘pocket-friendly’ solution that brought down the overall cost of the entire project implementation. All the credit goes to EDB and Chemtrols Infotech.”
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