“The other solutions were up to many times more expensive than Pivotal Greenplum and did not meet our requirements in terms of storage capacity and computing power for high-speed loading. Pivotal Greenplum was the right data warehouse solution to meet our existing and future needs.”
MING ZHANG, VICE PRESIDENT, CHINA CITIC BANK CREDIT CARD CENTER
Introduction
China CITIC Bank is one of the earliest commercial banks established during China’s reform and among its first to engage in financing. Headquartered in Beijing, China CITIC Bank has 78 branches and 622 sub-branches in China and its business covers nearly 130 countries and regions around the world. With a credit boom in China and a massive increase in consumer borrowing, China CITIC Bank has positioned itself as a strong competitor within the rapidly-expanding domestic credit card market. The bank’s credit card center had issued more than 140 million credit cards.
Facing intense domestic competition, China CITIC Bank Credit Card Center relies on mission-critical analytics and the ability to access data in real time as it works to improve its business agility and deliver on its data analysis strategies. As part of its strategy to increase market share, the bank uses highly targeted marketing communications. That means its employees must be able to customize their product marketing materials to specific customer profiles and complete campaign delivery within the shortest time possible.
Challenges
Centralizing the Data Warehouse
Prior to deploying Pivotal Greenplum, China CITIC Bank was running disparate systems and a physical hardware platform designed for supporting single applications, which significantly delayed access to customer data. Adding to the challenge, the bank was using a tape storage solution to meet regulatory requirements — but data extraction was slow and difficult to scale.
‘In today’s banking industry, the biggest challenge for data warehouse applications is to effectively manage and make use of growing customer data, meet business development needs and help improve business competitiveness,’ explains Ming Zhang, Vice President, China CITIC Bank Credit Card Center.
The Credit Card Center of China CITIC Bank identified the need for a centralized, highly-scalable data warehouse solution that could integrate with the bank’s FICO TRIAD Customer Management Solution, Database Marketing platform, IBM Cognos Business Intelligence software and subcenter customer relationship management (CRM) system.
Solution
Pivotal Greenplum Delivers Performance and Scalability
China CITIC Bank chose Pivotal Greenplum over IBM DB2, Oracle 11g and Teradata 14 because it was the only solution built on open-platform, ‘shared-nothing’, massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture.
Pivotal developed an enterprise data warehouse solution for China CITIC Bank that provides MPP architecture for data loading and parallel query processing to support operational, tactical and strategic business intelligence (BI) activities across the company.
“We were the first bank in China to use third-generation data warehouse technology to build a high-performance open system that’s capable of linear expansion,” notes Zhang. The project involved extracting and converting data from the bank’s existing legacy systems and developing a single centralized enterprise data warehouse to enable multi-user collaborative work across 11 departments and various analytical systems. Based on Pivotal Greenplum, the data warehouse solution design seamlessly integrates with the bank’s existing solutions and systems.
Benefits
More Productive Telephone Sales Center
With Pivotal Greenplum, the telephone sales center for China CITIC Bank Credit Card Center has consolidated the history of all outbound marketing into its data warehouse. Due to high-performance loading and automatic parallelization of data and queries, the department’s user productivity and loan revenue have increased dramatically.
Optimized Marketing Campaigns
Since implementing Pivotal Greenplum, China CITIC Bank has successfully conducted more than 1,286 marketing campaigns and has reduced its average configuration time for each campaign by 86 percent. The bank has also streamlined its minimum delivery time – reducing it from two weeks to two or three days.
Accelerated Data Analysis
By using Pivotal’s in-database analytics features, the bank has decreased the time it takes senior data mining analysts to generate new models from two to three months to less than one month.
“With a wider range of business data and a 50 percent increase in the system refresh rate, our users are spending 40 percent more time on data analysis, which makes a huge difference to our business,” says Zhang.
Reduced Risk
Armed with real-time customer data, the bank’s Risk Management department can access customer-purchasing behavior and make immediate adjustments to individual customer credit limits.
“Improved business agility makes us highly responsive to customer requests and changes in transaction data,” Zhang explains. “This helps us significantly reduce our risk, while still serving our customers and meeting their credit needs.”
Conclusion
China CITIC Bank’s Pivotal Greenplum solution integrates all data within a central database to establish a unified customer view. From there, analysts can conduct complex and diverse client analysis from multiple perspectives — resulting in significant financial savings.
“The credit card center has already gained up to 40 times the investment in Pivotal Greenplum, which is a significant achievement,” Zhang comments.
Now that Pivotal Greenplum can horizontally scale within the centralized platform, China CITIC Bank is optimizing its existing resources by adding modular device clusters on demand. Through its online system expansion, performance and capacity increase in a linear fashion. This enables the solution to deliver major savings due to reductions in space, power consumption and hardware requirements.
