KCB Group cuts budget cycle time by 60% using Oracle Cloud EPM

With operations and services in several countries, KCB Group has a complex loan- and deposit-based banking revenue model. Preparing the budget for branches and business lines required processing enormous amounts of data from several sources and took more than 12 weeks to finalize.

Meanwhile, finance analysts were spending more than 70% of their time on budget preparation, which greatly hindered their ability to focus on analysis and decision-making. In addition, management reporting was slow due to the lack of integration between KCB’s core banking system, enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform, and asset management application. There was no common reporting environment for business users.

The planning cycle was also cumbersome because the financial information used was not always reliable, and non-funded income planning was based largely on external market drivers and trends.

KCB sought a cloud-based planning and budgeting platform to automate processes and ensure rapid delivery of financial data and reports to key stakeholders.

After a thorough selection process, the bank chose Oracle Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) because of its comprehensive functionality, as well as its ability to integrate seamlessly with the group’s core banking, ERP, and other systems, which would simplify the deployment process and accelerate time to value.

KCB Group increased agility by implementing Oracle Cloud EPM Planning to automate and fully integrate the financial planning and budgeting processes of all group entities across seven countries. The deployment shortened process cycle times significantly and boosted decision-making across all business lines.

The bank’s budget preparation times at both the branch and business segment levels were slashed by 60%. This freed up finance personnel to spend more time on valuable tasks, such as in-depth financial analyses, and less time gathering and consolidating huge amounts of data from various disparate systems.

Along with the improvement to its planning process, KCB gained the ability to conduct strategic plan simulations on top of Oracle Cloud EPM, enabling KCB managers to create multiple planning models within minutes. Using various scenario models, the income planning cycle is also considerably faster and data-driven, and no longer relies on current external market drivers and trends alone.

Management reporting of actuals versus forecast greatly accelerated and improved for KCB Group, thanks to the integration of Oracle Cloud EPM with KCB’s banking and data warehouse systems. These systems process billions of US dollars’ worth of loans and deposits, and with Oracle Fixed Assets—part of Oracle Financials—manages an asset base of almost US$10 billion. The seamless integration ensures that users can fully trust the accuracy of reporting actuals across all regions where KCB is active.

Overall, the Group has boosted the productivity and collaboration of finance teams by providing a single source of truth for all planning and budgeting data and associated reports, which are available on a common platform anytime, anywhere.

KCB Group is extending the use of Oracle Cloud EPM for its monthly management information systems (MIS) reporting and is currently rolling out the planning module to all subsidiaries across all countries. The bank also plans to implement Oracle Enterprise Performance Reporting Cloud Service in combination with Oracle Cloud EPM Planning to further streamline internal and external reporting.

For the implementation of its Oracle Cloud EPM platform, KCB selected Oracle Partner Constellation Consulting because of its deep experience in both EPM processes and associated technologies.

The Constellation team acted as a functional process advisor as well as system implementer, providing a detailed recommendation to the KCB team for an EPM roadmap. The implementation was completed within four months, and supported KCB’s strategic priorities of improving efficiency, productivity, and driving a digital future.