Chohung Bank

Korea’s First Enterprise Data Warehouse
After merging with other banks in 1999, Chohung Bank has successfully converted to a business division system and implemented an advanced management infrastructure, including a three-terabyte data warehouse and integral profit management system.

In January 2000, CHB completed development of Korea’s first Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) and Web-based marketing database system. The EDW, powered by Sybase IQ, is used as a data storage unit that integrates transaction data and all customer-related information. The customer and transaction information contained in the EDW is updated and available daily to about 700 CHB users in discrete business unit ‘marts,’ such as integrated systems for managing profit, credit and risk.

Since the introduction of the EDW, the bank has developed new marketing efforts such as more customer-friendly branches and algorithm marketing. By utilizing customer information contained in the EDW, the bank plans to further enhance its customer relationship management (CRM) activities with marketing programs for various types of customer groups and tailor-made customer services.

“In the past, reports were available to our business units, but without the concept of analysis,” says Gi-Un Gyung. “Data was being used for statistical purposes only because our DBMS ( Data Base Management System) did not support any method of assessing the tendencies and transaction patterns of our customers. Now the EDW provides us with ways to comprehensively analyze transaction contents and customer contract sheets. As a result, our branches have begun to request more from our system, because it provides them with the data they need to understand their customers more deeply.”

The Sybase IQ-powered data warehouse enabled CHB to prepare an enterprise-wide foundation for information flow and to save time and investment costs for each ‘mart’ and unit system. The bank has also implemented a foundation for supplying integrated data for each customer, enabling data, trend and evaluation analyses throughout the bank.

CHB also developed a customer-oriented Web marketing database system that substantially alleviated needs for future upgrades or increase of management costs. It uses the data search scheme based on the hyperlink/one-stop approach, which improves the customer consultation process. With Korea’s first mining system using customer transaction information and pattern, CHB was able to develop a customer behavior prediction model and sub-categorize their customers, substantially reducing data collection costs.

Sybase IQ: Maximized Results with Minimized Costs
Beginning in 2000, CHB’s 45-person team took 10 months to complete the bank’s enterprise data warehouse. Team leadership decided early on to discard the outmoded and inapplicable “star” network topology models that proved to be virtually impossible to manage for a super-scale data warehouse with large-capacity columns. Instead, the team implemented a new model that links Sybase IQ’s column index feature and the bank’s Entity Relation (E-R) modeling tool. This resulted in a drastic reduction of development costs, such as decreasing the disk space required for system operation by 75 percent.

The CHB team has been able to realize significant time and IT budget savings for users through two technology advantages unique to Sybase IQ: column-based loading and query processing methods, which reduce loading, indexing and processing time exponentially over traditional relational database management systems.

Other Sybase products included in the development of CHB’s enterprise data warehouse include:
Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise, Sybase Warehouse Control Center and Sybase Power Designer.

“We felt that Sybase provided the best expandability,” continues Gi-Un Gyung. “In the past, as data sets were imported into our previous database, their sizes increased. However, Sybase solutions compress the files by 40 to 70 percent, saving disk space. Furthermore, Sybase IQ provides advanced automatic distribution and parallel processing capabilities, which are critical to our ability to serve many users simultaneously every day across all of our divisions.”

Looking Forward at CHB
The bank’s continuing objective is to implement a complete CRM system capable of assessing customer needs by integrating an ever-growing number of data channels. Although current services are being provided mainly to individual customers, CHB plans to expand the services to corporate customers and enhance their sales capabilities.

“We understand that about 60 percent of CRM projects fail,” concludes Gi-Un Gyung. “Based on our success to date with our EDW, due in large part to the performance enhancements and cost savings we have achieved with Sybase IQ, we have every confidence that our own CRM efforts will be an important part of our continued success in our market.”