Strength in the face of diversity

SAS helps Standard Chartered Bank to understand its customer base and improve target marketing across Asia If you operate in a region as diverse as Asia, and in an industry as competitive as financial services, understanding your customers is not just important, it's what can make or break your business. Standard Chartered Bank's Steven Parker knows this better than most. As head of customer information for consumer banking in Asia, Parker is responsible for devising and implementing customer information strategies for nine countries, ranging from emerging markets like India and Indonesia to established financial centers like Hong Kong. "One thing these markets all have in common is that they are very competitive, but the type of competition varies," says Parker. "We are in the middle of a mortgage war in Hong Kong and Singapore right now but in other markets the fiercest competition is for credit card customers. In less mature markets like India and Thailand our major focus is customer acquisition, while here in Hong Kong we are looking more at retaining customers and cross-selling our services. But whichever market you look at the old rules still apply. You have to get to know your customers - their needs, their preferences - if you are going to be successful." Developing this in-depth knowledge of customers is even harder in Asia due to the lack of public data. Says Parker, "You can't just go out and buy geographical and demographic data like you can in other parts of the world. This means that the customer data you build up internally is even more important. With the right approach, the right infrastructure and the right solution to make it work for you, your customer data can give you a huge competitive advantage." The advantage of flexibility For Standard Chartered the right solution includes SAS data warehousing and analysis software, which is a central part of the bank's customer relationship management (CRM) strategy. According to Jim Thomason, senior information systems manager for consumer banking, SAS' biggest advantage is its flexibility. "We face different issues in different countries and SAS can be applied to almost all of them," he says. "Whether it's credit scoring in Singapore, customer retention in Hong Kong or acquisition modeling in India, SAS helps us get the answers. Some of our people have been genuinely surprised by what they can achieve with SAS." "SAS' scalability is also essential to our operations in this region, since our customer sets range greatly in size. We have huge amounts of data for Hong Kong, Malaysia and India whereas the data sets for the Philippines or Brunei are obviously much smaller. SAS is very good at handling different sizes of data - there is very little difference in performance and it's much faster to analyse SAS data sets than it is to analyse a standard relational database." Standard Chartered's data warehouse structure has been in place for four years, but has evolved over that time both geographically and in terms of functionality. Each country now has its own central repository from which data is pulled each week - in some cases each day - into specific data marts for use by different departments, such as marketing and finance. SAS software helps to automate much of this process. A data dictionary of all the information held in each data mart is also produced so that users can more easily carry out their analysis. Locally led, centrally delivered "The development of the warehouse and data marts is locally led and centrally delivered," says Thomason. "User committees drive the requirements at a local level and we make sure that everybody is moving in the same direction. This means that the development costs are lower and ensures that what we put in place is what our users need. "This regional approach also has the advantage of helping us to share experiences and ideas in different countries. For example, we implemented SAS Enterprise Miner in our credit scoring center in Singapore recently. We aim to put Enterprise Miner in our Hong Kong office very soon so our experience in Singapore will be very valuable in getting things right here." Management information Users of the warehouse data include several dozen 'power users' - SAS programmers who carry out in-depth analysis, and hundreds of business managers around the region, who use SAS to access the data marts for more basic management information. SAS/IntrNetR is deployed to allow these managers to carry out analysis at their desktops using a Web browser. A set of standard reports is available so that users can quickly obtain the most important information. They can also create their own basic ad-hoc reports and drill down into the data through an easy-to-use front end, without the need for any SAS programming skills. A more recent addition to the system is SAS/MDDBR Server software, which gives the bank a multidimensional view of their data through advanced online analytical processing (OLAP). This enables users to slice and dice the data according to different dimensions, such as country, time or product. Targeted campaigns Steven Parker is in no doubt as to the benefits of the system both for the bank and for its customers around Asia. "Our marketing offers are now much more targeted," he says. "We are now able to carry out hundreds of highly targeted small campaigns instead of huge scatter marketing campaigns. This means that our customers are not deluged with irrelevant offers and that we get a better return on our marketing dollars." "We definitely took the right approach to CRM and as a result we are in a far better position than most in this region," adds Thomason. "We started at the back end with the warehouse implementation before moving through to analysis and campaign management, then finally to the front-end systems. The enterprise warehouse is at the center of the whole structure and this was the most important thing to get right. SAS has played a big part in helping us to do this. "Another important factor is that we developed the warehouse for analysis right from the start. Many organizations build a warehouse with a management information system in mind, and then find that they have to change the whole structure when they want to do more complex analysis and modeling. For us adding the analysis capabilities was easy because we already had the right infrastructure in place." As for the future, Standard Chartered's enterprise warehouse will continue to evolve, as rapid expansion in its use demands constant reengineering. Parker points to the huge amount of data that is coming through new channels. "We already offer mortgages and other services online and will be launching an Internet banking service very soon," he says. "We also offer services for mobile banking. Data from all these new channels needs to be brought into the warehouse and combined with other customer data for analysis. That's an area we will be addressing very soon."