Business Intelligence (BI) has picked up a lot of attention in the corporate world as a result of its ability to turn raw data into meaningful information. The term BI dates back as far as the 1860s, in 1989 however, Howard Dresner proposed it as a category to enable management to apply data analysis techniques to support the critical processes of making informed decisions in business. On a daily basis, Microfinance Institutions collect data through their operations; Business Intelligence includes the applications, infrastructure, tools, and various best practices that enable the Microfinance to gain access to analysis of this data, hence generate information that can be used by the executives to make better business decisions.

The ADBanking BI module from ADFinance was designed to meet the reporting and consolidation needs of managers from Microfinance Institutions. The module provides overview reports of the whole Information System or separated per branch. The information includes a balance sheet, trial balance, income statement, credits reports, and savings reports. Besides those management reports, regulatory reports are also provided. All regulatory reports for central banks of Rwanda, Burundi, and BCEAO are available in consolidated format or per branch. Using the ADBanking BI module, MFIs can also have ad-hoc reports tailored to their particular needs, hence allowing managers to be able to have customized dashboards with a 360° degree view of their business operations.

Microfinance Institutions can use Business Intelligence information to identify efficient versus inefficient business processes, which in turn would facilitate improving the process of decision making, reduce business costs, as well as identify new opportunities that would further grow the business. The ADBanking BI module provides the ability to analyze the business and places its analytical power in the hands of the regular manager hence removing the need to wait for specialized IT expertise to dig through the collected data. The Business Intelligence systems, sometimes referred to as Business Analytics systems are able to provide historical, current, and predictive insights about the business, derived from data that has been gathered from Microfinance operations.

The various aspects of the BI module interact with other modules of the ADBanking information system, including many other sources of business data that may be defined for purposes of management and monitoring of business performance management. For faster and cost-effective setup, the Microfinance may choose to deploy Business Intelligence in the ADFinance Cloud, thus being able to tap into various advantages of Cloud Computing, which would allow management to focus more on making use of the intelligence results for core business purposes than the aspects of how it is set up and maintained.