Reference no: EM132721461

Data Warehouse Gives Nordea Bank a Single Version of the Truth Nordea, headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, advertises itself as "the largest financial services group in Northern Europe." Although Nordea has existed for a long time, the modern institution was formed in 2001, when major banks in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland merged their resources and operations. Today Nordea has more than 1,400 branches that conduct business in 19 countries. Its clientele includes 10 million private customers and 600,000 corporate clients. The group also operates an Internet bank, which services 6 million online customers.

• Nordea's finance group agreed to lead a data warehouse project with a budget of €100 million. The project was managed not by the IT department but by the finance group because that group "owned" the data and the data-management processes. The project had two overriding objectives: to improve customer service and to comply with all relevant regulations.

• As noted, Nordea was created from the merger of separate financial institutions from four countries, each with its own legacy information systems. (A legacy system is an outdated information system or application software that is used instead of available upgraded versions.) Data at Nordea were handled manually, stored on spreadsheets, and managed locally. This arrangement couldn't meet the demands of today's global banking system.

• Because of these data-management problems, Nordea's top priority for the data warehouse project was to crate a single version of the truth. Consequently, the finance team agreed on common data definitions and created the master data necessary to compare variables across locations and business functions. The data warehouse contains 11 terabytes of data, including more than 7 billion records.

• Nordea deployed the data warehouse, based in Stockholm, with impressive results. Reporting lead times fell from eight to four days. The bank can now conduct analyses more quickly and accurately at lower costs, using data from one coherent source. Managers in the branches and in headquarters, along with the financial controllers, now receive the branch results in the same format, at the same time. They can drill down to the customer, account, and product data. Nordea's customer relationship managers also benefit from the data warehouse. The organization introduced a customer profitability application so that customer relationship managers can more easily prepare for customer meetings because they do not have to obtain customer data from various databases.

• The data warehouse enabled Nordea to meet the current regulatory requirements more quickly, accurately, and cheaply. Because of the reduced costs of compliance, the bank can reallocate capital to address needs in other areas of the business.

• Nordea continues to thrive. In the third quarter of 2014, the bank's customer base grew and it had more than €250 billion in total assets under management. Finally, the bank's loan loss level is below its 10-year average.

Note that answers to each part of this question must be different.

Tips about good examples:

Good examples have three characteristics. Each example needs to:

(i) link to the specified case using terms specific to the business and functional area under discussion,

(ii) clearly illustrate the concept or theory being addressed or examined using an example and (iii) differentiate from other examples, by being specific enough that this could not readily apply to other concepts or theories, i.e. provide enough information to illustrate WHY the example is relevant to the concept or theory being examined.

Problem 1: Provide two examples of deliberate threats to Nordea's data warehouse system. For each threat, identify a security control and explain how it would work to mitigate the threat. Controls must be different.