SWIFT Selects Cognos Enterprise Business Intelligence For Global Reporting and Analysis

– Cognos selected to underpin international financial telecom society's SWIFTWatch Portfolio –

Sibos 2005 (BOOTH # A015, Hall B) COPENHAGEN, DENMARK, September 7, 2005 - Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence and corporate performance management (CPM), today announced that SWIFT, the co-operative that supplies standardized messaging services and interface software to financial institutions worldwide, will use Cognos Enterprise BI to underpin the online reporting and analysis capabilities for its recently launched SWIFTWatch portfolio.

SWIFT is a financial industry-owned co-operative servicing over 7,800 financial institutions in more than 200 countries. With the SWIFTWatch portfolio, financial institutions within the SWIFT community will have access to predefined online reports, dashboards and data analysis tools to better monitor different aspects of their business, including traffic flows, market share, messaging costs and expenses. Overall, the new system is designed to help companies improve operational efficiency, increase customer knowledge, and enrich their sales and marketing efforts.

“TowerGroup finds that financial services institutions are adopting enterprise business intelligence dashboards as a pervasive and attentive eye to gauge process and system performance throughout their service delivery chain,” said Guillermo Kopp, vice president at TowerGroup. “Such transparency allows institutions, industry utilities, and networked service providers to improve operational efficiency by establishing peer learning and accountability at all levels.”

In selecting a reporting and analysis platform, SWIFT needed a Web-based solution that was scalable, intuitive and secure. Data transferred between financial institutions is very sensitive, so the solution had to guarantee that banks will not see competitor message traffic, and only have access to their own data. SWIFT ultimately chose Cognos Enterprise BI, anchored on Cognos PowerPlay® and Cognos ReportNet™.

Leveraging Cognos Enterprise BI, SWIFTWatch users receive a global overview of traffic and expenses, while product and marketing managers gain more detailed insights into the volume, cost and market share of their business activity over SWIFT. The Cognos solution only requires a Web browser, so no software installation is needed. From anywhere in the world, managers receive regular and timely data updates, compare data over multiple periods and export data to other applications. Standard reports containing overview traffic or cost data are also available to download, providing immediate highlights and trends.

“Cognos Enterprise Business Intelligence gives our members greater insight into message traffic and costs, and enables them to analyse trends over time, drill down from summary data to in-depth data and present data in different formats,” said André Boico, director of marketing at SWIFT. “This new generation of reporting and analysis provides both internal and external monitoring tools, which are essential in the heavily competitive industry in which our members operate today.”

The SWIFTWatch portfolio consists of two fundamental components – SWIFTWatch Reports and SWIFTWatch Analyser. SWIFTWatch Reports provide powerful business and market reporting via subscription. SWIFTWatch Analyser consists of traffic, message cost, and billing modules to enable sales, marketing and finance staff to explore data interactively and easily identify trends and exceptions.

“SWIFTWatch gives our sales force the data they need on a day-to-day basis to monitor the reciprocity of their correspondent relationships,” said Johan Gernaey, SWIFT coordinator at KBC Bank & Insurance Group, a Belgian independent, multi-channel bancassurance company that caters to over 11 million customers across Europe. “Since the new tool is online and user-friendly, we will be able to expand its benefits to all major KBC entities, giving them a powerful set of management information tools to support our strategic decisions."

“SWIFT is a highly respected organisation in the financial community and we are delighted to have been selected to deliver such valuable insight into market performance,” said Laurence Trigwell, senior financial services director at Cognos. “In being able to monitor message traffic by region and counterparty, banks are able to benchmark their organization more accurately. SWIFT itself will also be able to capitalize on the Cognos solution to identify and advise customers how they could be more efficient by routing more messages over the SWIFT network.”

Cognos is a recognized leader in delivering business intelligence and corporate performance management solutions for the banking and financial services industry. Nine of the top 10 banks in Europe and the United States use Cognos . Customers include Regions Financial, Bank of Ireland and First Citizens Bank. For more information about Cognos solutions for the banking and financial services industry, please visit http://www.cognos.com/solutions/industry/
banking-financial-services/insurance.html.

About KBC:

With a market capitalization of around 24 billion euros, KBC Group is one of the top Belgian companies and one of the leading financial groups in Europe, employing 50.000 staff and catering for 11 million customers. For more information, visit http://www.kbc.com or http://www.kbc.be.

About Cognos:

Cognos delivers the next level of competitive advantage - Corporate Performance Management (CPM) - achieved through the strategic application of BI on an enterprise scale. Our integrated CPM solution helps customers drive performance through planning; monitor performance through scorecarding; and understand performance through business intelligence.

Cognos serves more than 23,000 customers in over 135 countries. Cognos enterprise business intelligence and 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.