Dah Sing Uses SAS to Understand Its Customer Base

The banking and financial services landscape continues to change at a dizzying pace. But one old rule still applies: survival of the fittest. Those who want to survive – and thrive – in the new e-economy have to move fast to keep up with customer demands for expanded services and a wider range of products.

It's all about the customer, and the customer wants efficient, inexpensive, personalized services available through a variety of channels. Financial services institutions are striving to meet these demands and balance them with increasing costs, tighter budgets and controlled risk.

Dah Sing Bank Limited believes that customer intelligence is extremely important because it is part of the bank's intellectual property. "Customer information is our asset," explains Thomas K.C. Ng, General Manager and Head of the Information Technology Division of Dah Sing Bank Limited. "For example, by using our customer base and knowledge we can market different products and services. This means not only financial but also non-financial products, such as our E-buy products on the Web. We cooperate with merchandisers for these non-financial products and services. The feedback from our customers is very positive. This has become one of our new business lines, which we would like to pursue further.

"With our customer knowledge and understanding of the market, our business model can be modified to fit the needs of the market. We can expand beyond banking services despite the uncertain economy.

"In a customer-oriented business, technology is an important factor in supporting business operations. We've been partnering with SAS for years and we have adopted SAS analytics and business intelligence solutions for our customer analysis. The right technology combined with our marketing expertise helps us understand our customers' needs better and target the right products to them through effective channels. In this way, junk mail can be avoided and costs can be reduced."

Offering more
Dah Sing Bank aims to provide value-added services to its customers. The bank is taking strategic advantage of its customer base using advanced technology to provide such services. "Before using SAS, many of our reporting and customer analyses were done manually. Using SAS Enterprise Miner^TM integrated with our customer database, intensive analytic tasks such as credit scoring and credit risk analysis can be handled in an automated way. Undoubtedly, the timely output we achieve benefits us in terms of time and efficiency. For instance, credit risk analysis provides predictive information that helps us to cut losses earlier than other banks," Ng says. "SAS software also allows us to do more sophisticated customer profiling from different views."

Data quality is all-important. Handling large amounts of data used to be time-consuming for Dah Sing. The challenge was to maintain the large volume of data and information involved, and yet keep it as accurate as possible. "At the same time," adds Ng "we have to make sure we collect the right information and use it in an appropriate way. Technology should be deployed to support our professionals, strategically matching information to business processes, while speeding up our response to market change.

"We are comfortable in using SAS, not only because we are skilled and familiar with SAS software, but also because we found that many data warehousing solutions or business intelligence packages in the marketplace will bundle or package SAS' products. This certainly gave us confidence in its market presence."

Ng predicts even further advances with the bank's SAS solutions. "In the future, we are planning to build a more comprehensive data warehouse for performing more analyses such as customer segmentation. SAS Enterprise Miner and SAS business intelligence solutions can help us move forward in this direction. Our Retail Credit division is currently the key user of SAS, but the Marketing and Strategic Planning department, which mainly handles customer relationships and data mining, will deploy SAS in the near future, especially for functions like analysis on profitability and segmentation."

A unique customer relationship management strategy
"In terms of new business and wealth management, we believe knowing customer needs is the critical success factor. In addition, the banking industry is the key engine in driving e-commerce. On the Web, Dah Sing Bank has seen satisfactory results selling both financial and non-financial products. It's proven that our target marketing is highly effective with the use of our customer intelligence," Ng concludes.

About Dah Sing Bank Limited
The principal activities of Dah Sing Bank Limited are the provision of banking, financial and other related services. Dah Sing Bank adopts a market segmentation strategy by offering personal financial services through different business units, including a retail branch network, a Private Banking arm and a newly introduced VIP Banking Service, to meet the diverse financial needs of different customer segments.

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