Financial Services Companies Rely on SQL Server 2012 to Deliver the New Standard in Mission Critical Platforms

In spite of the old adage about “keeping a banker’s hours,” the reality of today’s digital world demands that financial services institutions are available 24/7. For the IT department, this means building systems that ensure high availability and always-on services. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 delivers these key features, and more, making it a natural choice for a growing number of financial institutions.

SQL Server 2012 is setting a new standard for mission critical platforms—helping customers get the uptime and performance they need at a low TCO. Backed by enterprise security and support for virtually any data, SQL Server 2012 delivers mission critical capabilities with full enterprise features that are built into the solution, not provided as add-ons with additional charges. Ultimately, this means financial organizations can rely on a comprehensive, integrated solution that helps to contain costs and manage compliance needs, while meeting the demands of the new digital world.

Check out the following real world examples to see how financial institutions around the world are using SQL Server 2012 to support their mission critical requirements:

Garanti Bank Boosts Efficiency by More Than 30 Percent and Performance by 70 Percent

Garanti Bank, Turkey’s second largest private bank, wanted to increase productivity, enhance insight, and save money while maintaining 99.999 percent availability. To achieve this, the bank upgraded 500 databases to Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and replaced mirrored configurations with SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn availability groups. As a result, the organization boost IT efficiency by more than 30 percent, reduced expenses, accelerated performance by 70 percent, and increased agility and competitiveness.

“With SQL Server AlwaysOn, we expect to increase the efficiency of IT personnel by more than 30 percent. We will also reduce costs by increasing hardware utilization and streamlining IT processes.” Umut Nazlica, Manager of Open System Databases, Garanti

Banco Central do Brasil Boosts Performance, Reporting Speeds, and Scalability

Central Bank of Brazil is in charge of tracking the finances of more than 150 banks. The organization wanted to improve the performance of its data warehouse, which has seen a rapid uptick in the growth of financial data. Based on tests with SQL Server 2012 that showed a 30 percent performance improvement over the previous database, the bank decided to implement a new Microsoft-based data warehouse. With the SQL Server 2012 solution, the bank can generate reports faster and provide better overall customer service.

“We saw a 30 percent improvement in data warehouse queries using SQL Server 2012 with the xVelocity feature…. that performance will help our financial analysts get risk data to customers faster.” José Cláudio Mendonça de Freitas, Central Bank of Brazil

SunGard Saves Testing Time and Boosts Performance of Financial Risk Software

SunGard, a Fortune 500 global provider of financial and other IT solutions, wanted to improve performance for its Adaptiv suite of financial risk management products. By upgrading Adaptiv to a Microsoft SQL Server 2012 database solution, SunGard was able to slash set-up for test environments from a week to a day, fine-tune performance using enhanced behind-the-scenes functions, and cut end-of-day processing tasks by 16 percent.

“Because of the new readable secondaries offered by SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn, we … can cut 30 minutes from our three-hour end-of-day processes.” Karl Catling, Director of Adaptiv Labs for SunGard

Bank of Nagoya Dramatically Accelerates Database Queries and Increases Availability

To better meet the needs of its customers and support expansion inside and outside Japan, the Bank of Nagoya needed to improve its use of customer data and ensure 24/7 system operation. The IT team tested Microsoft SQL Server 2012 data management software and was especially pleased by SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn high-availability and xVelocity for increasing database query speeds. Even in its early stage of deployment, the Bank of Nagoya has seen dramatic improvements in query speeds—from 30 minutes to 3 seconds, improved the availability of its core bank systems and the productivity of its IT staff.

“By using SQL Server 2012 xVelocity, we were able to extract about 100 million records in 2 or 3 seconds versus the 30 minutes required previously.” Mr. Atsuo Nakajima, Assistant Director of Systems Development, Bank of Nagoya

Great Western Bank Gains Customers and Maximizes Profits with Microsoft BI Tools

To support ambitious growth plans, Great Western Bank needed to increase profitability, simplify compliance, and gain better insight into customer relationships. The bank deployed a Microsoft SQL Server 2012 data warehouse and business intelligence solution because of previous success building an extremely complex system with Microsoft technology. The bank can now more easily attract and retain customers, maximize the amount of money it loans and invests, and prove its growth capacity to regulators.

“Banks that try to compete against us are simply going to be at a disadvantage if they don’t have the enterprise-ready data-warehousing and BI capabilities that SQL Server 2012 and Power View give us.” Ron Van Zanten, Vice President of Data Quality, Great Western Bank

Want to read more about how organizations are using SQL Server to support their mission critical needs? Visit the customer story page on the SQL Server website where you can sort through more than 200 customer stories by Industry, Country, Solution Workload, Partner or SQL Server version.