FleetBoston Financial emerged in 1999 as a global diversified financial services company from a merger between financial powerhouse Fleet Financial Group and BankBoston—the oldest commercial bank in the United States.  FleetBoston Financial grew to become the seventh-largest financial holding company in the United States, with assets exceeding $200 billion. The company serves 22 million customers in over 20 countries and territories around the world. FleetBank was acquired by Bank of America in 2004.

The Challenge
In the wake of the recent merger, FleetBank had 2 very important corporate initiatives:

Retain Customers.  FleetBank planned to make sure that the merger did not negatively impact customer interactions.

Reduce Costs.  FleetBank planned to closely monitor its system integration efforts to reduce information technology-related costs.

Prior to the merger, FleetBank was looking to gain a competitive advantage by venturing into a forward-thinking and ambitious goal—serve customers better through strategic marketing.  To better analyze customer trends enterprise-wide, the company decided that the right technological strategy was to create a centralized customer view using a next generation data warehouse.

“There was a concerted effort by Fleet to take this leap forward as a customer service strategy,” was the sentiment expressed by Peter Osborne, Data Warehouse Vice President for Fleet Technical Services.  “Current technology practices wouldn’t take us where we wanted to go—we wanted to design and build what is to be the future state in technology.”  That “future state” appeared in the form of a next generation data warehouse.

“We wanted to design a predictive modeling system to what our customers needed and offer that product to them,” said Osborne.  “This results in a much higher ‘hit’ rate for customized services to the customers.

A customer base of eight million households representing 20 million customers, plus half a million small business customers, is a “problem” most financial institutions would not envy, not eschew.  However, converting and integrating the over 330 gigabytes of raw data stemming from the customer base—spread among 5,700 outlets—into a next generation data warehouse is likely to challenge any information technology (IT) manager.

To retain happy customers and reduce costs, Osborne had two data integration problems:

1. Deliver an aggregated customer view necessary for strategic marketing.
2. Consolidate and exchange information to accommodate the merger between Fleet Financial Group and BankBoston.

The Solution
Osborne enlisted assistance from Gartner to identify a vendor with a strong data transformation product.  Ultimately the strength of the ETI Solution® technology put it on the short list with two other vendors.

Criteria
FleetBank identified several important features in its search for a potential data integration product including capabilities to:

• Handle disparate data sources
• Access COBOL flat files
• Interface with SYBASE
• Scale in order to transfer large quantities of data across multiple platforms
• Customize the conversion process
• Quickly respond to unknown future changes in IT infrastructure

ETI Solution allowed for customization, could automate much of the transformation process and accommodated new data sources with a minimal amount of re-work.

Decision
Fortunately, a company previously acquired byFleetBank had licensed ETI Solution.  This situation enabled Osborne and the team to attend the ETI™ User’s Conference to research the product further.

“The User’s Conference was probably the most helpful, because we got to hear real people present their experiences; and position the strengths of the product against what some of the challenges were,” Osborne stated.  “And it wasn’t just ETI telling us about their product—the customer experiences meant something to us.”

FleetBank selected ETI Solution with ETI Data System Libraries for:

• COBOL/File System
• C/File System
• C/SYBASE

Project Details
Due to unprecedented project scope, there was no initial completion goal set by FleetBank.  Once into the project, Osborne and his team anticipated at least 24 months to completion of the first project phase associated with the strategic marketing initiative.

The centralized customer data warehouse was loaded from multiple source systems residing on 12 UNIX® Sun Servers containing about 330 gigabytes of raw data—business rules were used to transform the data into consistent formats.

“We realized the transformation process would need to be properly designed, with the critical work done upfront, such as business rules, before the conversion took place,” Osborne said.

And that meant extensive upfront design work, which Osborne could now identify as crucial to the project’s success.  Various KPMG (Bearing Point) consultants assisted in the upfront design work and 12 Logan/Britton consultants were utilized throughout project phases to assist in the implementation.

In fact, the design work was so crucial to the project, Osborne estimated that the entire project really consisted of about “80 percent design and 20 percent actual conversion.”

The Results
Retain Customers
FleetBank's success in building a centralized customer view using a next generation data warehouse has become storied in technical, financial and business circles, locally and internationally.  In addition to meeting with other institutions who seek advice on similar data integration and warehouse efforts, he references an article in Computerworld, where FleetBank was profiled both for minimizing effects on customers and meeting cost-savings targets during and after the merger.

“We use the data warehouse to do branch usage analyses,” said Osborne.  “Since we inherited branches after the merger that are no longer correctly located according to our customer base and use, we have been gradually closing some of those branches.  The warehouse allows us to monitor who uses what branches, where those customers live and where they work.”

Respond Quickly to IT Infrastructure Changes
Strategic Marketing Initiative:
Two new data sources—the Internet and the bank ATM’s—were brought in, plus existing data sources were updated resulting in approximately 5000 modifications.

“In a period of one weekend, we input the new target schema and with the DSL, regenerated all programs with minimal amount of manual re-work,” Osborne said.  “That never would have happened without the combination of time spent on the upfront design and the transformation capabilities of ETI Solution.”

Merger Impact
FleetBank was charged with making mandatory divestiture requirements as a condition of the merger.  The ability to make those analyses and implement them with nominal ill effects was crucial.

The files from BankBoston were initially loaded into the centralized customer data warehouse through ETI generated interfaces.

Osborne says, their data has grown to 850 gigabytes—1.5 terabytes with histories.  Still, “100 percent of the data that goes into the warehouse goes through ETI generated programs, for a very uniform and standard process to handle all data transformation.