Success Stories

Click on any of the links below to read the case study relating to that organization:

Kotak Mahindra

Punjab National Bank

Airtel

HDFC Standard Life Insurance

State Bank of India

HDFC Bank

Franklin Templeton Investments

Kotak Mahindra

Ixsight Scrubbix and DeDuplix to identify unique individual and household customer relationships for merging 8 different entities to form a new bank.

The Customer

Kotak Mahindra is one of India's leading financial institutions, offering diverse finance solutions, that encompass every sphere of life. From Corporate Finance to Retail Finance to Investment Banking, to Mutual Fund, to Life Insurance, they meet the everyday financial needs of an individual as well as a corporate giant.

Kotak Mahindra has international partnerships with Goldman Sachs (one of the world's largest investment banks and brokerage firms), Ford Credit (one of the world's largest dedicated automobile financiers) and Old Mutual (a large insurance, banking and asset management conglomerate). The Group operates in over 50 cities in India and the USA, UK and UAE, employing over 1100 dedicated professionals and services a client base of over a half million customers.

To offer prompt and efficient service to its clients, the Group has been structured into three SBUs of Wealth Management, Knowledge Management and Asset Management. Through 8 companies created for the purpose of the above, Kotak Mahindra has operations in the areas of Retail Broking, Mutual Funds, Investment Banking , Debt Trading, Auto Finance, Corporate & Technology Finance and Consumer Finance to name a few.

Kotak Mahindra Finance Ltd. (KMFL) would be shortly converting itself into a Commercial Bank bringing all its operations under a single head. The new Bank is due to be launched by the last quarter of the current fiscal, and is expected to offer a wide range of services to retail and corporate customers across India

As part of its IT strategy, one of Kotak Mahindra's early initiatives was to combine the various customer databases across the various companies into a single central repository containing unique individuals and other business and family relationships. The Data server was on an Oracle / Unix Platform. In order to gain an early advantages the Group needed to meet critical time-frames.

The Challenge

To identify and extract relevant data from as many as 8 host systems.
To be able to get from the IT managers in each of the 8 companies, the various non-address static information regarding the data.
To understand and solve the anomalies represented by this data in the short available time of no more than 6 weeks.
To generate a single database consisting of cleansed, deduped and enriched data consisting of unique corporate and individual customers.
To map and combine entire data (address and non-address) across the various systems into a single destination system on Oracle running on Unix.

The Solution

Kotak Mahindra deployed Datafix solutions from Spectrum Business Support Limited (now part of Ixsight Technologies Pvt. Ltd.) in understanding data-related issues, anomalies and exceptions in the data and resolving them. The Ixsight team provided its considerable experience and knowledge of working with data related issues to identify problem sources and fixes.

Ixsight tools were used to cleanse, standardize and dedupe the data of over 1 million in a short span of 25 days, and to provide a unique base of Individuals and Households. The data covered more than 25 metros and mini-metros including some from rural India as well. Customised rules were generated and provided for the various types of data depending on customer type (Corporate or Individual), customer location and customer address.

Ixsight leveraged the full power of its automated routines, data-sensitised manpower, comprehensive master tables and experience in the financial domain to undertake this task as a time-critical mission. The project also included an incremental deduplication round at the very end, to match new records added in the interim while the cleansing process was going on, with the already matched data.

In addition to name and address information, non-address information like marital status, date of birth was also extracted. Finally the data was integrated across the various source systems using mapping tables and a thorough understanding of the data elements and data ranges in each of the individual systems.

KMFL was a satisfied and happy customer having met its goal on time and within budget.

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Punjab National Bank

Ixsight for data cleansing and data Deduplication of core banking system data at major bank.

The Customer

Punjab National Bank (PNB), established in 1895 in Lahore, then a part of undivided India, is arguably the second largest public sector commercial bank in India with about 4,500 branches and offices throughout the country. PNB has its Corporate Office at New Delhi and 25 Zonal Offices which in turn supervise 48 Regional Offices under whose control the branches function.
PNB was ranked at 1243 in the Forbes Global 2000. As part of the move to mordernise and enable centralized customer management PNB was one of the earliest Banks to adopt Core Banking software.

The Challenge

Formulating the cleansing standards and rules and the business rules for deduplication of customer master data with the involvement of various functional departments and groups within the bank with differing requirements.
Developing the process and methodology to get the cleansed data from the single location where the job was done to the geographically widely dispersed 481 branches and the validated data back from those branches to the single location.
Creating an independent Data Mart and helping PNB managers identify uses of Cleansed and Matched Data validated by branches by either porting it back to source system or through a separate mechanism.

The Solution

PNB chose Spectrum Business Support's Ixsight solutions (now part of Ixsight Technologies Pvt. Ltd.) to provide the Data-cleansing and Deduplication solution for the first 4.3 million records from 480 + branches. The following tasks were done by the Ixsight team, using Scrubbix for Data-cleansing and Deduplix for Data Deduplication :

Data Cleansing and Deduplication of Migrated Data.
Generating exception reports of bad quality data based on various data quality dimensions like invalidity, inaccuracy, missing values, precision etc.
Developing onscreen validation routines which could be used by the 481 Branches.
Measuring success of validation and incorporating corrections back into the system.
Data Deduplication by identifying Unique Individuals and Households.
Generating various Customer segmentation reports which could be used by PNB's think tank.

The following key customer discoveries were part of the analysis:

- Top 20% of customers.
- Geographical and Demographic segmentation.
- Data Quality Analysis.
- Loyalty scores based on house holding.

The whole project was completed using Ixsight in a span of 80 working days. This was followed by Nationwide Correction at the Branch level along with successful and well organized effort. The cleansed and deduplicated data is now being used by PNB's internal departments as part of the various customer-centric initiatives.

In terms of overall Management and the geographically dispersed nature of project, this was a great success and gave a tremendous competitive advantage to the client.

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Airtel

Ixsight - Scrubbix, DeDuplix and GeoFix to help reduce customer churn and improve customer delight at large telco.

The Customer

Bharti Airtel Ltd. is one of India's leading private sector providers of telecommunication services, with an aggregate of approx. 27 million customers, as at end-September '06, including roughly 25 million mobile phone customers. Bharti Airtel has been rated among 10 best performing companies in the world in the Business Week IT 100 of 2006, with revenues at USD 3.66 billion. “Airtel”, their brand of cellular phone services, is the largest cellular service provider in India.
World leaders in the telecom industry such as Vodafone and SingTel hold partial stakes in Airtel.

The Customer Service Department of BAL's Karnataka Circle (BAL-KC) headquartered at India's IT city, Bangalore (now Bengalooru), wanted to identify their most profitable customers, fraudulent customers and find geographical patterns, if any, emerging from customer data.

The Challenge

Cleanse existing customer data, standardize and enhance it and then deduplicate the same to arrive at Unique Customers receiving singular or multiple services.
Geo-code (or Map) customers to discover high density penetration areas to determine location of collection points and ramp up service delivery.
Prevent subscription of bad-history customers, including corporates.
Identify and group customers in a family/group to design schemes leading to “customer delight”.
Deploy a continuity model to ensure improved data-quality at source level for the new data.
Enable cleansed and de-duplicated data to be uploaded back into the source system being managed by IBM.
Ensure that the structure of the output was compatible with source system being managed by IBM Global Services as BAL's outsourced IT services provider.
Improve aesthetics of mailing labels printed using cleansed data.

The Solution

AL - KC chose Spectrum Business Support Ltd's Ixsight Solutions (now part of Ixsight Technologies Pvt. Ltd.) to meet the challenge, using three Ixsight suite products - Scrubbix, DeDuplix and GeoFix. Before deploying the products and related services, the process began with Identification of Key Data related issues through an audit process followed by subsequent Identification of Cleansing and Deduplication rules. Following were some of the key deliverables:

Data-cleansing of Customer Data into highly granular and standardized format.
Extraction of landmarks information.
Cleansing of Corporate Names and Identification of Corporate Groups.
Enrichment of data with Religion, Gender information for enabling initiatives to increase customer delight through customized communication.
Enhancement of address information like Missing ZIP codes, District and State information and qualitative information like gender and title.
Identification of unique Individual Relationships, Households and Corporate Groups and generation of Unique IDs through the process of de-duplication using several rules.
Geo-coding of Unique IDs and Households together with location of existing drop box and collection centers on the Karnataka State Map.
Provision of training for subsequent ongoing activities.
Uploading of Unique ID data back into the billing system being maintained by IBM.

The Ixsight team delivered on time and within budget.
At the end of the process, BAL- KC could segment the customer data based on geographic and demographic information like religion, gender, location etc. Using the Spatial Map, BAL-KC could identify weak and strong areas of service and penetration. This in turn enabled them to strategise their marketing, customer service and customer delight initiatives leading to benefits in terms of improved customer communication, customized customer communication and better handling of service calls at the Customer Service Call Centre.

Since Ixsight usage benefits had far exceeded expectations, BAL-KC have asked Ixsight to stay involved. Ixsight has been recommended to BAL-Pune Circle (BAL-PC), and work has begun there as well. Also, at BAL-KC itself, Ixsight is helping to evolve a training model for their data capture touch points based on the learnings from the project. The continuity plan will ensure that the data quality achieved through the project is not a one-time effort but an ongoing process.

In the words of their Customer Service Head, “ The Ixsight process truly had a positive impact on the business reducing customer churn and helping the customer discovery process”.

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HDFC Standard Life Insurance

Ixsight - DeDuplix to identify unique customers for meeting regulatory compliance of large insurance company

The Customer

HDFC Standard Life Insurance Company Ltd. (HSLICL) is one of India's leading private life insurance companies, which offers a range of individual and group insurance solutions. It is a joint venture between Housing Development Finance Corporation Limited (HDFC Ltd.), India's leading housing finance institution and one of the subsidiaries of Standard Life PLC, leading providers of financial services in the United Kingdom.

HSLICL has insured over 1.6 million individuals. The key challenge for HSLICL has been the management of rapid growth, while ensuring high standards of customer service. In 2005, the organization wanted to identify Unique Customers in order to comply with IRDA (Insurance Regulatory Development Authority) regulations wherein they had to report the number of customers on a periodic basis.

HSLICL had recently changed its software vendor and therefore the data comprised of data from the old and the new system with significant redundancy. HSLICL wanted to weed out the duplicates and also give the correct Unique identification number to the customers.

The Challenge

Identifying the most appropriate business rules to identify duplicates.
Developing a methodology for assigning the right ID number as a derivative of the original System number.
Presenting the results in such a way that HSLICL could verify, validate and upload deduplicated data back into the application system.

The Solution

HSLICL chose Spectrum Business Support Ltd's Ixsight solutions (now part of Ixsight Technologies Pvt Ltd) to provide the Deduplication solution using DeDuplix, which is part of the Ixsight suite. The Ixsight team conducted the following tasks:

Identifying cleansing issues through DQ Audit process, viz., Date of Birth data needed to be validated and cleansed prior to matching.
Identifying the most appropriate business rules and thresholds for Data de-duplication, through multiple de-dupe runs in consultation with the client
Assigning Unique IDs, identifying Households and Uploading the resultant data back into the application system.

The Ixsight team completed the project on time and within budget. HSLICL was able to meet its compliance requirements on time. HSLICL was happy enough with Ixsight, that they have now (2006) entrusted Ixsight with the job of cleansing their data.

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State Bank of India

Ixsight - Data Quality Audit and DeDuplix for data quality and CRM strategy formulation at large bank.

The Customer

State Bank of India (SBI) (LSE: SBID) is the largest bank in India. Measured by the number of branch offices and employees, SBI is the largest bank in the world. Established in 1806 as the Bank of Bengal, it remains the oldest continuously operating commercial bank in the Indian Subcontinent and the most successful one, providing various domestic, international and NRI products and services, through its vast network of 9,000+ branches in India and overseas. With an asset base of $126 billion and its reach, it is a regional banking behemoth. In addition, there are 7 associate banks, with additional 4,500 branches.
SBI began the Herculean task of implementing a Core Banking Solution for itself and all associate banks in the beginning of 2003. After completing phase I of the migration, SBI turned its attention to the activity that would realize their biggest asset : qualitative Customer information from the vast amount of legacy customer data.

The Challenge

With a view to understanding the data quality gaps and to develop a road map to closing them, SBI engaged Spectrum Business Support Ltd's Datafix Solutions team (now Datafix Technologies Pvt. Ltd.) to undertake a Data Quality Study and Audit (DQ Audit). Simultaneously, we were required to provide SBI IT Management an understanding of the requirements of time and funds to obtain a true foundation of customer-oriented information, by running a De-duplication pilot on a significant portion of the migrated Phase I data, numbering 3.3 million records.

The Solution

The DataFix Solutions team brought home the two independent but simultaneous tasks, including a recommendations presentation to SBI, within 1 month and within budget.

Data Quality Consulting and Audit.
- Define Data Quality Audit Project Scope identifying DQ dimensions, gaps and parameters to be studied.
- Data Quality Study including defining Business Rules and Domain Rules for conducting the DQ Audit.
- DQ Audit Process and presentation of results including listing of DQ problems that would likely hamper SBI's information
management and Customer Relationship Management strategy.
Data De-duplication Pilot
- Pre-cleansing 3.3 million records data sourced from the Core Banking application.
- DeDuplicating the records to arrive at Unique IDs.
- Identifying key customer relationship metrics based on unique individual and household Ids.

Based on the results and our recommendations, SBI is equipped to develop a blue-print for their Customer Quality Initiatives to create long-term competitive advantage.

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HDFC Bank

The Customer

HDFC Bank (NYSE: HDB), one amongst the firsts of the new generation, tech-savvy commercial banks of India, was set up in January 1995, after the Reserve Bank of India allowed setting up of Banks in the private sector. Within only 1.5 years, HDFC Bank was established as the premier bank in this segment, forming relationships with the top 200 corporations in India.

Since mid-1996, HDFC Bank expanded into retail banking in a big way, rolling out various products such as international debit cards, electronic bill presentment and payments, loans against shares, auto loans, personal loans, credit cards apart from value-added savings, and current and term deposits. Currently (2006), HDFC Bank has 535 branches located in 228 cities of India, and all branches of the bank are linked on an online real-time basis. The bank offers many innovative products & services to individuals, corporate, trusts, governments, partnerships, financial institutions, mutual funds, insurance companies. The bank also has over 1300 ATMs.

HDFC Bank's Call Centre wanted to correct customer telephone number information apart from verification and validation of the same.
In order to do this the telephone numbers of customers had to be matched with third party telephone directories.

This method was an option to the more expensive mailing exercise of sourcing telephone numbers from the customers.

The Challenge

Given that the telephone directories available in the country use only abbreviated forms of addresses and Names and given the fact that telephone numbers change very quickly, the task of mapping this and verifying the numbers as well as populating numbers was a challenging task.

The Solution

HDFC Bank chose Spectrum Business Support Ltd's Ixsight Solutions (now part of Ixsight Technologies Pvt. Ltd.) to provide the telephone number matching solution through Ixsight. The solution was provided by DeDuplix part of the Ixsight Suite. As part of the project, the following tasks were done by the company:

Conversion of HDFC format to compatible format with telephone directory format.
Converting Telephone Directories to a compatible format.
Using a 5 level hierarchical match between both databases.
Identifying exact matches and probable matches.
Identifying validated matches and populating probable set of numbers where telephone numbers did not exist.

The whole project finished in about two months. At the end of this, HDFC Bank saved time and effort in its initiatives to increase efficiency of customer communication. The project also performed as per the benchmarks set.

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Franklin Templeton Investments

Ixsight for data cleansing and data deduplication of mutual fund major to increase operational efficiency.

The Customer

Franklin Templeton Investments is one of the largest financial services groups in the world based at San Mateo, California, USA. The group has US$ 511.3 billion in assets under management globally (as of Sep 30, 2006).

Franklin Templeton India (FTI) has offices in 33 locations across India and manages assets of Rs.23,920.26 crores for around 19 lakh investors as of Oct 31, 2006.

In March 2005, the Operations Department of FT India wanted to increase the efficiency of the department to reduce operational costs, ensure reduced mail returns and for statutory purposes like Tax Deductions as well as easy identification of Bank information for payment verification purposes.

Even though FT worldwide had Trillium as their vendor for datacleansing, for India they chose Spectrum Business Support Ltd's Ixsight Solutions (now part of Ixsight Technologies Pvt. Ltd.) for DataCleansing and De-duplication of the 0.9 mio database.

The Challenge

The challenges before FTI were:

Identification of Data cleansing rules through a preliminary pilot.
Identifying with Ixsight the cleansing and de-duplication rules.
Developing a methodology to test the output of cleansed data in parallel and meet the stringent project deadlines.
Developing mechanisms whereby the cleansing happened at one center but the management and checking happened at the IT center in a different location and all communication happened through secure FTP channels.
Ensuring that the cleansed and de-duplicated data could be uploaded back into the source system.

The Solution

FTI chose Ixsight Technologies Pvt. Ltd. (then part of Spectrum Business Support Ltd.) to provide the Data-cleansing and Deduplication solution through Ixsight comprises of two solutions Scrubbix and DeDuplix. As part of the project, the following tasks were done by the company.

Data-cleansing of Customer Data into highly granular and standardized format.
Specific attention given to Names data consisting of 5 user Names including guardian and nominee as well as Bank Branch information. Identity Resolution for meeting Unique Legal Investors, Unique Households, Unique First Investors and Unique Investors.
Identification of data anomalies, which needed resolution through data verification.
Cleansing of Corporate Names and Identification of Corporate Groups.
Enhancing address information like Missing ZIP codes, District and State information and qualitative information like gender and title.
Creating customer profiles based on address and non-address information including Name, address and Bank profiles.
Identification of unique Legal entities, First Investors, Households and Investors.
Harmonization of matched address.
Incremental Matching of change and incremental Data.
The output of Ixsight was uploaded to the source system being maintained by FTI. FTI had a time deadline for this activity and participated whole-heartedly with Ixsight in making this a success.

Project success factors were clearly outlined and measured at every stage of the process. FTI engaged a special team to randomly validate the cleansed data output right through the process.

FTI today

FTI achieved tremendous mailing savings as a result of this exercise within the very first month itself not to mention the additional customer discovery information that they now had to fine tune their marketing strategy. The operational Department of FTI were truly happy at the success of the project.

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