Financial Services Company Focusing on the Bigger Picture Thanks to GL Wand

Kleinwort Benson is a UK private bank offering award-winning private banking and wealth management services to private, corporate, and institutional clients.

The main issues that they experienced were around month-end reporting—data was difficult to access from SAP in a format they could use effectively. The finance team worked extensively in Excel, and report recipients were used to reading reports in this format; it made sense to exploit this application more in the future.

With a key understanding of the SAP marketplace, Kleinwort was recommended insightsoftware’s GL Wand solution. With a simple install on the server and an Excel add-in deployed to the users’ machines, the bank’s new reporting solution was up and running.

The Excel interface makes the software highly intuitive, so very little training was required. Formula building and all the usual features found in Excel were second nature to the finance team, while access to live data and drill-down capabilities meant that the reporting environment was so much more dynamic than it had been previously.

All the data security and stability of SAP was provided, but with none of the usual difficulties experienced manipulating large volumes of data in Excel. Added to that, once the reports had been built, they could be refreshed at the click of a button, allowing new live data to populate the reports. This made building reports so much faster, enabling the finance team to concentrate on analyzing the numbers and delivering more value to the business.

GL Wand provides a quick, cost-effective solution to finance departments who need access to live data and don’t have the time to export into Excel, manipulate the data, or wait for data warehousing to supply the figures.