As Taishin Financial Holdings' chief information officer, B R Ho has led the bank through its migration to service-orientated architecture, a move which has enabled the company to build a far more comprehensive knowledge of its customers. Writer Michelle Price

B R Ho, senior vice-president and CIO of Taishin Financial Holdings

In the hyper-competitive Taiwan banking market, providing excellent customer service is not merely a means of differentiation: it is a question of survival. Few know this better than the sector's chief information officers (CIOs) and IT directors, who are tasked with providing the infrastructure through which new, ever-slicker innovative services are delivered. As senior vice-president and CIO of Taishin Financial Holdings, B R Ho is one such individual.

Created in 2002 upon the completion of a merger between Dah An Commercial Bank and Taishin International Bank, Taishin Financial Holdings comprises wholesale, wealth management and retail businesses, and ranks in the top quartile of the country's competitive banking market. In order to keep Taishin in its strong position, Mr Ho and his team have been focusing their efforts on a number of strategic areas within the IT environment. These include a large-scale migration to service-oriented architecture (SOA), the movement towards a single view of the customer, and enhancing the credit risk management function.

Moving on

Mr Ho says that the bank is moving away from Cobol, one of the oldest programming languages still in active use, and into a flexible SOA, wherein IT systems may be plugged into one another with minimal cost and effort. "By moving to SOA, we can treat any new development as a component," says Mr Ho. The bank is undertaking the migration in incremental steps, but the final goal is for all of its IT systems to become componentised, he adds. Key business areas, such as the bank's sales force automation (SFA) system, have already benefited from the SOA migration.

Each day the bank, which boasts a dedicated sales force of some 3000 people, operates between 30 and 40 separate marketing campaigns through its SFA system. Historically, members of the sales team were forced to move between a number of systems and screens when dealing with customers, in order to view silos of customer data. The SOA migration, however, allowed the bank to migrate all the necessary data into one SFA system, says Mr Ho.

"By building a single customer view to present a single customer profile - in terms of both products and services - to our sales force, it has made it much easier and more convenient for staff to use the system," says Mr Ho. His long-term strategy is to migrate all the bank's individual systems and customer data in this single view on a real-time basis.

As with many Taiwanese banks, Taishin invests a considerable amount of resources in its customer relationship management strategy. Mr Ho's team is building out the bank's data warehouse and has established a team dedicated to analysing customer behaviour and potential cross-sell opportunities. "Based on the product strategy, we use this data to launch several campaigns a day," explains Mr Ho. For example, branch-based tellers are alerted to information such as a recent birthday, or a previous transaction 'event', which may indicate an interest in another product.

Knowing the customer

"In the branch, every teller already knows the latest information relating to the customer: if you have any complaints, or if you've just had a birthday, the teller will immediately respond and provide the customer with the right information." This makes the bank's intended goal of real-time data capture and migration between systems especially critical. "Timing is very important," adds Mr Ho.

This type of pre-emptive service is provided not only through the branch but also through its online banking facility and call centres. Transaction 'events' at ATMs, for example, are designed to trigger a follow-up marketing call. "We already have the single customer view to provide that channel information through our SOA implementation, so we can provide the single customer view to each channel representative." The success of this strategy is demonstrated in the number of products bought by each customer, he adds.

Information integration

Taishin Financial Holdings is also integrating data on customer behaviour into its new credit risk management system, implemented in 2007, in order to enhance its reliability - although this is more challenging, says Mr Ho. "Because the behaviour information is not yet very rich, developing the risk management models and setting up the new function for measuring customers' credit levels is very complicated," he adds.

During the coming year, the bank will be dedicating its efforts to building out new service channels - in particular ATMs and branches - including the creation of so-called 'convenience banks' in supermarkets and even mini-branches in hospitals.

Career history

B R Ho

1999 - Joins Taishin Financial Holdings as CIO.

1997-99 - Vice-president of SAP, Taiwan.

1979-97 - Manager of IBM, Taiwan.

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