Hong Kong Bank Goes The Data Warehouse Route

Hong Kong's Wing Hang Bank has implemented a Compaq-based data warehouse system for managing its customer information and relationships.

The new system will help monitor customers' banking behaviour, said the bank. The client-server system is based on the Compaq AlphaServer 4100 running the Tru64 Unix operating system and SAS Institute's relational database system.

The data warehouse system includes more than 20 gigabytes of storage and 100 user licenses for the SAS software.

The 64-bit Compaq AlphaServer 4100 is the platform for the database applications. Its Very Large Memory (VLM) support and I/O bandwidth provides both the capacity and performance to process Wing Hang's customer transactional data estimated at 800 megabytes a month.

Wing Hang Bank's data warehouse system currently serves approximately 35 users in its corporate banking and financial management divisions but it will eventually be extended to different departments in its headquarters and to all customer service staff in 40 branches.

Using Windows-based PCs as the front end to the data warehouse system, staff can obtain a comprehensive profile of each customer.

The SAS relational database system transforms, validates and consolidates source information extracted mainly from the bank's mainframe, and stores the data in a data warehouse repository on the Compaq AlphaServer 4100 and Tru64 Unix platform.