Standard Chartered Uses SAS® To Build Customer Ties in 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 essential. As head of customer relationship management (CRM) for consumer banking in Asia, Parker must devise and implement 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 in-depth customer knowledge is even harder in Asia due to the lack of public information. 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, head of consumer banking in customer systems, 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," Thomason adds. "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 analyze SAS data sets than it is to analyze 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 functionally. 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 analyses.

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 analyses, and hundreds of business managers around the region who use SAS to access the data marts for more basic management information. SAS/IntrNet is deployed to allow these managers to perform analyses at their desktops using a Web browser. A set of standard reports helps users 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/MDDB Server software, which gives the bank a multidimensional view of its data through advanced online analytical processing (OLAP). With OLAP, users can "slice and dice" the data according to different dimensions, such as country, time or product.

Targeted Campaigns
Steven Parker has no doubts concerning 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, the enterprise warehouse at Standard Chartered will continue to evolve as rapid expansion of its use leads to constant re-engineering. 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."

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