Challenge
A major NYC-based personal banking, credit card, personal loans and investment bank had problems with its daily processing environment. Their account handling was cumbersome and expensive, the number of account statements they needed to generate was spiraling out of control, and their statement processing costs were constantly growing. With the diverse products offered by the bank, it was not uncommon for individuals to maintain 20 separate accounts, including checking, savings, credit card accounts, line of credit accounts, mortgage accounts, mutual funds, and many more. Sending multiple statements to each customer was laborious and expensive, not to mention confusing to their customers. Given the more than 200 million accounts involved, and the diversity of data within each account, the bank needed a flexible and powerful solution to consolidate their account statements. Simply consolidating their existing applications would have been completely impractical—their processing complexity and costs were already virtually unmanageable.
They could beef up their hardware to help deal with growing processing loads, but this would only add to an already growing complexity and accumulating cost.
A better solution was needed.
Solution
tableBASE was able to resolve both problems for these customers.
To solve the account statement consolidation problem, two things were done. First, in-memory tables are used rather than a direct link to the various account databases. This allows for extremely fast access to account information—a critically important component to any consolidation plan. Second, business rules were separated from all business processing applications—this was the key to the solution, and made it possible to consolidate their customer account statements. The introduction of table-based programming and externalized rules made it possible for rules changes to be controlled by the marketing department, without the need for extensive involvement of the IT department (for code changes, testing, staging, and commissioning to production). This is a tremendous saving—now, application code rarely needs updating, and never does for rules changes—IT resources are freed up for other business. These two changes made it possible for consolidated account statements at a lower cost than before. Now they can handle well over 15 million online subscribers, with room for growth.
Benefits
This bank was able consolidate applications, while reducing spend on application maintenance, application development and increasing throughput on their systems. tableBASE optimization technology now plays a significant role in their core competency, and is helping them to drive business growth.
