SCIENCE

Guangdong Rural Credit Cooperatives has selected IBM technology to build an enterprise-wide banking system to support its long term business strategies and growth.  

The new workload optimized system, built on IBM hardware and software technology, has been rolled out to 23 members of Guangdong Cooperatives located in seven cities in Guangdong province.  When the project is completed in mid-2011, the bank's 99 cooperative unions and 5,600 operation outlets will be able to use the system to conduct 15 million transactions - up from 4 million - a day with improved performance and efficiency.

The advanced IBM platform will help Guangdong Cooperatives by consolidating existing IT systems and replacing inefficient or duplicate systems. It will also provide a 360-degree view of customer data, delivering a more detailed understanding of its customers for more personalized services such as VIP Premiere Service, identifying new market opportunities, and making better decisions for risk management and credit assessment.   This is another example of IBM's leadership in providing workload optimized systems that deliver integrated systems, software and storage for analyzing vast amounts of complex data.  

In addition, member banks will be able to approve and process personal loan applications more efficiently and accurately -- with time for approval shortened from weeks to a couple of days.  The increased level of efficiency enables member banks to shift their focus on providing more innovative banking products to a growing population of new customers, including farmers and small to medium businesses. The new technology will also help target efforts to better serve remote cities of Guangdong Province, the fastest growing region in China.

"The successful implementation of phase one of the IT project for 23 members represents a major milestone in Guangdong Cooperatives' transformation into a leading financial institution in China," said Mr ZHANG Xuejun, President of Guangdong Cooperatives' Banking Service Center. "By deepening our customer-oriented perspective, we hope to boost service and enhance our business through these important technology investments."  

The entire system links all municipal and county cooperatives, integrating with all other banking operations. As a result, Guangdong Cooperatives will serve as the provincial transaction processing center, data processing center and capital clearing center.

Guangdong Cooperatives' data consolidation project, started in 2008, is by far the largest and most complicated in the banking industry in China to date. IBM was selected as the preferred partner over Hewlett-Packard and Oracle, responsible for providing the core technology for the IT infrastructure and integrating the 23 disparate systems previously installed in member cooperatives.

Guangzhou Cooperatives was established in 2005 to serve 99 cooperative associations and rural commercial banks in Guangdong Province. Guangzhou Cooperatives has jurisdiction over the members, and is responsible for setting industry standards and rules, trading management and coordination of service functions.

The new IT infrastructure built on DB2 database software will consolidate the data and integrate the business processes of all members of Guangdong Cooperatives. IBM analytics software will also enable Guangdong Cooperatives to analyze and explore customer transaction information while IBM InfoSphere Information Server software will support the bank to integrate all relevant data resources and govern the quality and completeness of the information.

As part of the project, IBM has relocated the bank's key business and core banking systems onto a hardware platform that consists of IBM Power 595, Power 570, Power Blade Server and DS8300 storage platform. IBM Power Blade, with its unified management capability, allowed the bank quickly to deploy data consolidation in its provincial center as well as other operations.

Mr LIAO Li, General Manager, IBM Systems and Technology Group, IBM Southern China said, "As the strategic partner of Guangdong Cooperatives, IBM is committed to supporting Guangdong Cooperatives to embark on this major transformation to leapfrog as a key banking institution in China. Like many leading banks and financial institutions in China, Guangdong Cooperatives will be able to tap into IBM's technology and services to ensure it has a stable, flexible, and scalable infrastructure to support its business growth."

In the future, the IT infrastructure will also serve as a platform for product innovation, risk control and marketing and public relations, helping to improve its customer services and enhancing its position in the marketplace.