Singapore's DBS Bank understands customer needs with help from SAS^®

With SAS business analytics and SAS® for Banking, Singapore's largest bank has consolidated data from 16 markets to get a more accurate view of customers and products. The consolidation has helped the bank minimize credit risks and better anticipate customer needs.

DBS Bank is one of the largest financial groups in Asia, with operations in 16 markets. Headquartered in Singapore, it is one of the largest banks – as measured by assets – in that country and is a leading bank in Hong Kong.

"Customers work with us because we are an Asian banking specialist,'' explains Peter Brown, DBS Managing Director for Enterprise Services Technology and Operations. "We have a deep understanding of Asia and an intuitive understanding of how business is done in this region.''

DBS has used SAS since 1989, "but we used it in different locations in different ways,'' Brown says. When the bank decided it wanted to migrate all of its data to a standard platform, it chose SAS for analytics and reporting. "We'd reached a stage where we felt confident that SAS could help us.''

SAS for Banking provides DBS with in-depth analytics for data management. This banking-specific architecture also provides the foundation to help drive customer relationships and marketing efforts. The SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform integrates individual technology components within the bank's existing IT infrastructure into a single, unified system.

With SAS, senior executives get a regional view of credit risk, which helps the bank understand the potential impact of turmoil in the financial markets. It has helped the bank comply with BASEL II requirements in Singapore and Hong Kong, including implementing the advanced internal modeling needed for risk pooling.

Nilo Reyes, Senior Vice President of Consumer Banking Technology and Operations, says SAS is a time saver because of the prebuilt templates for reporting. "We can evaluate requirements in a faster way because of SAS,'' he says. Going forward, Reyes is using SAS to look more at what customers will do, instead of what they have done. "We want to be able to predict what products customers will want. This software will help us put the right product in the right market.''

"We see our relationship with SAS continuing to grow both as we expand regionally and as we develop more sophistication in the way we service our customers and manage our risk," Brown says.

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