PowerBI Migration: Transforming Reporting for a leading Middle Eastern Bank

Our Client is the leading bank in the world with a strong presence in the Middle East and beyond. They had a vision to stay ahead of the curve in financial innovation, offering customer-first solutions. Hence, the Client wanted to transition their legacy systems as they prioritized delivering a seamless, personalized customer experience supported by data-driven decision-making.

The Challenges: Stalled Reporting Capabilities

With rapid expansion and growth of the Client’s business, the reporting needs had multiplied, which eventually turned their structured BI system into a tangled web of reports, tools, and dependencies. This scenario prevented business users from utilizing the full potential of their reporting capabilities.

These are some of the key challenges the Client wanted to overcome: 

• SAP Business Objects 4.2 platform was approaching end-of-life in 2022, and its support costs were soaring
• Lack of self-service capabilities made business users depend heavily on IT teams
• Redundant and unused 6,500+ reports made the system bloated and hard to navigate
• Years of over-customization had left the semantic layer (Universes) in disarray
• IT teams were overwhelmed, constantly managing, fixing, or recreating reports instead of adapting to evolving needs. 
  
  Thus, the Client realized to move forward; they had to rethink everything while complying with 
  on-premise data regulations in the UAE

The Solution: Smarter Reporting with PowerBI

With restricted cloud options due to banking regulations, the Datamatics team implemented an on-premise solution to aid the Client through a bold, deliberate, and deeply collaborative transformation journey. Datamatics team leveraged:

• Microsoft PowerBI (on-premise) as the visualization platform for equipping their teams with dashboards and interactive analytics
• SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) to replicate essential report formats and create highly formatted, pixel-perfect reports
• A new semantic layer to standardize and simplify data access across departments.
• The team opted for a manual migration strategy as automation tools could extract only half the metadata correctly
• The report inventory was rationalized from 6,500+ to 5,000+, focusing on actual usage and business relevance.