Cognos Unveils New Performance Solution Designed To Help Corporate And Retail Banks Improve Customer Profitability

– New Cognos Customer Segment Performance Blueprint enables managers to analyze customer behavior and profitability, then plan sales and marketing initiatives to improve results –

BURLINGTON, MA November 6, 2006— Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, announced today the launch of a new performance solution designed to help both retail and corporate banks optimize customer segment profitability using a coordinated, fully-integrated performance management process.

In today’s competitive market, understanding customer behavior and potential profitability is one of the top performance objectives for most financial services organizations. The new Cognos Customer Segment Performance Blueprint enables managers to tap into their vast amounts of customer data, create real intelligence on behavior, revenue streams and profitability by customer or groups of customers, then use these insights to effectively target, plan, track and measure new sales and marketing initiatives aimed at improving profitability and strengthening customer loyalty and satisfaction.

"Understanding what drives customer profitability is the Holy Grail in retail banking" said Eugene McCarthy, head of profitability measurement in Bank of Ireland’s Retail Division. "With the help of Cognos, we have been able to increase our understanding of our customer base, across all product businesses, as well as provide our customer relationship managers with meaningful, actionable information that impacts their decision-making process. Customer data is much more consumable and therefore, much more strategic to our organization"

Offered in two versions – one for Corporate Banking, and the other designed specifically for Retail Banks – the new Cognos Customer Segment Performance Blueprint capitalizes on market-leading and integrated functionality found in Cognos 8 Planning and Cognos 8 BI. Specifically, bank managers can benefit from:

* Intuitive dashboards and reports to monitor performance across customer segments, a single customer segment, and even individual customers
* A full customer-segment level profit and loss statement, enabling customer segment owners to prepare a driver-based forecast for each segment
* Initiative planning capabilities that guide the user to choose the most profitable products to promote within a segment, identify the most effective means of reaching customers within that segment, and provide simulations across multiple initiatives to determine the initiative with the highest predicted success

To ensure the most granular, accurate level of profitability measurement and planning, all costing and profitability insight is created via Acorn System’s Performance Analyzer Application, which uniquely assigns general ledger costs, revenues, and resources through business processes to precisely determine the baseline cost and profitability of individual customers, segments, channels, branches, products and even transactions, based on historical performance. With greater confidence in these numbers, managers can spend less time on calculations, focusing instead on delivering the right products at the right time to targeted customers, in order to drive profitable growth.

“Knowing which customers are making and losing money, and why, at the net profit level, is an essential foundation of any customer segmentation strategy that includes improving profitability as one of it’s goals,” said Chris D. Fraga, chief strategy officer at Acorn Systems Inc. “Armed with this insight, companies are increasing the profitability of their existing customer portfolio by aligning customer service levels to profit contributions, increasing business velocity with profitable segments, and re-negotiating favorable terms and pricing to maintain these profitable customers. Companies are also growing net new revenue profitably by proactively targeting profitable customer segments with marketing campaigns focused on profitable products and services. The integration of Acorn’s accurate content with Cognos Planning and BI combines all the right ingredients to enable companies to make better business decisions from a profit perspective.”

Both the Corporate and Retail versions of the new Cognos Customer Segment Performance Blueprint are available immediately to customers. Cognos also offers a Cognos Branch Performance Blueprint, which was launched in April 2006, to help banks optimize top -down, branch-up revenue and expense planning and reporting. Together, these Performance Blueprints help global financial institutions confidently and accurately manage against key performance objectives through multi-dimensional planning, analysis and reporting.

“Banking executives are recognizing the significant impact that declining customer loyalty and high turnover can have on profit margins. Yet, implementing competitive customer value propositions has traditionally had its challenges – disparate and often inaccurate customer data; initiative plans that are not tied to overall corporate plans and forecasts; and the reporting and analysis ‘disconnect’ that typically occurs with spreadsheet-based performance management processes,” said Gaurav Verma, financial services industry director at Cognos. “The Cognos Customer Segment Performance Blueprint provides an integrated, closed-loop cycle that paves the way for continual customer segment performance improvement. Delivering an extremely high level of precision and segmentation ultimately leads to increased revenues, higher profits and a stronger customer experience.”

Cognos is a recognized leader in delivering performance management solutions for the financial services industry. Over 1,000 financial services institutions worldwide use Cognos, including nine of the top 10 banks in Europe and all of the top 10 in the United States. Customers include Frost Bank, First Citizens Bank, Regions Financial Corporation, and SWIFT, the financial industry-owned co-operative servicing over 7,800 financial institutions in more than 200 countries . For more information about Cognos solutions for the banking and financial services industry, please visit www.cognos.com/solutions/industry/banking-financial-services/index.html

ABOUT COGNOS PERFORMANCE BLUEPRINTS:
Cognos offers a full suite of Performance Blueprints to address planning and performance management process areas that directly impact an organization’s ability to create business value. Both functional and industry-specific process areas can now be automated, streamlined and transformed to help organizations quickly create more business value. Developed by the Cognos Innovation Center for Performance Management, the Cognos Performance Blueprints are a key component within the Cognos Performance Management System, which combines technology, best practices, analytical applications and solutions, and a broad network of partners into a single performance management solution. For further information on the Cognos Performance Blueprints see http://www.cognos.com/innovationcenter/blueprint.html.

About Cognos:
Cognos, the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, provides world-class enterprise planning and BI software and services to help companies plan, understand and manage financial and operational performance.

Cognos brings together technology, analytical applications, best practices, and a broad network of partners to give customers a complete performance system. The Cognos performance system is an open and adaptive solution that leverages an organization’s ERP, packaged applications, and database investments. It gives customers the ability to answer the questions -- How are we doing? Why are we on or off track? What should we do about it? – and enables them to understand and monitor current performance while planning future business strategies.

Cognos serves more than 23,000 customers in more than 135 countries, and its top 100 enterprise customers consistently outperform market indexes. Cognos performance management solutions and services are also available from more than 3,000 worldwide partners and resellers. For more information, visit the Cognos Web site at http://www.cognos.com.

Cognos and the Cognos logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cognos Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. All other names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Contact Information

Carrie Bendzsa

Senior Manager, Public Relations

Cognos

Contact via E-mail