Fukuoka City Bank Invests in Customer Service
Snapshot
| Organization Fukuoka City Bank, with assets totaling US$26 billion, 3 million customers, 142 branches, and 2,400 employees |
| The Challenge To rapidly grow business and improve customer service by giving sales and service representatives better access to consolidated customer information |
| The Strategy Set up an intranet that permits sales and customer service representatives to access complete customer profiles and to query multiple and varied legacy systems, all in real time |
| The Results Faster and easier access, increased sales, improved customer relationships, better-than-expected ROI |
| Information Builders Solution EDA (Now part of iWay Software's product suite), WebFOCUS, FOCUS |
Banks are synonymous with growth – growing assets, growing profits, and growing their customers' portfolios – but like any business, they need to worry about growing their own infrastructures in order to keep pace with their business needs.
The Fukuoka City Bank (FCB), with total assets of US$26 billion and 3 million customers, is currently the third largest regional bank in the Kyushu area of Southern Japan, but bank officials have set their sights on reaching the number two spot within the next couple of years. In order to do that, however, the bankers realized that they would have to give their personnel, scattered across 142 branches, better access to existing customer information.
Before FCB started looking for a new solution, its sales staff often had a difficult time trying to compile information on its customers. The customer service representatives had no single way of pulling together complete customer profiles. Account listings, mortgage information, credit card data, and bill payment information were all stored in separate systems, and the staff had no way of consolidating it unless they put in a request to the IT department, a request that could take up to three months to turn into a report. In addition, FCB wanted to give its customers a way to access their own information and conduct their own queries online.
Intranet Application Proposed
The bank decided that the most efficient way to solve its access problems was to build an application that reached into the existing mainframe resources and capitalized on the mainframes' security, availability, and wealth of data. In order to be truly useful, bank officials concluded, the proposed intranet application would need to work in real time, which meant getting data out of the mainframes' IMS and DB2 databases and into the sales reps' desktops in under three seconds.
The bank was already an Information Builders customer and made use of the company's mainframe tools to support its MVS environment. FCB needed proof that other Information Builders' products could help to build the new application envisioned.
FCB asked Information Builders to conduct a test to demonstrate the capabilities of its FOCUS programming language, its EDA* middleware, and WebFOCUS for NT reporting tool to ensure that the combination could produce a Web-based application with the desired response times. The test proved to be more than satisfactory, and the bank ended up purchasing licenses for mainframe versions of FOCUS and EDA, plus licenses for WebFOCUS for NT.
Implementation began in early 1998, and roll-out was finished by 1999. During that time, the bank's staff was kept up-to-date on the project, thanks to promotional videos that ran daily in the branches.
Web-Enabled Systems Offer New Capabilities
The success of any IT business strategy comes only when and if the end users adopt the new technology and methods. In the case of the Fukuoka City Bank, success is a mild word to describe the results: as of July more than 2,400 sales and customer services representatives were logged on and using the intranet to create their own reports and file their own queries, and even though the Web-enabled system is easy to use, the bank is still holding ongoing training sessions for its employees. Response from the sales staff has been positive, and each month the bank publishes new stories of sales reps who have used the system successfully. One such story conveys the experience of a branch manager who says he attained his sales quotas due to the new capabilities offered by the intranet.
Measured in another way, the system is looking to be a financial success as well. The Fukuoka City Bank spent approximately US$10 million on hardware and software connected with this implementation, and initially expected to see a profitable ROI in about five years. Recent figures, however, have dropped that timeline down to about three years – numbers that can only reflect positively on the bank's balance sheet.
(*Note: EDA is now part of iWay Software's product suite)
