Web-Based Juniper Bank Drives Exponential Growth
Commentary by Rob Goodman, Director of Data Warehousing, Juniper Bank

As a new Web-based business seeking to beat the odds, Juniper Bank counted on reliable, usable information to drive its growth. Even before opening its Web site in October 2000, the Delaware-based bank realized the more it knew about its customers, the better it could market its array of online products, including credit cards, savings accounts, checking accounts, Certificates of Deposit, and ATM services.

To start, Juniper contracted with a host of third parties to manage its credit card, Web banking, online statements, and bill pay services. Faced with gigabytes of customer data from these disparate sources, the online bank recognized the need to integrate the data into a central repository where decision makers could rapidly retrieve it for market analyses and reporting purposes. Without a powerful solution, Juniper risked making faulty marketing decisions and losing precious cross-selling opportunities—a scenario that, in this case, could truly break the bank.

To overcome these challenges, Juniper turned to Ascential Software’s DataStage®, an industry-leading information asset management solution that integrates information from heterogeneous environments into a single data warehouse. Juniper uses DataStage to automatically extract and transform raw third-party data, such as credit card account data, banking transaction details, and Web site usage, and load it into its Oracle data warehouse. From there, company executives can generate reports that let them track the effectiveness of programs and analyze their marketing efforts.

Today Juniper has grown to over 150,000 customers and has more than $400 million in outstanding credit card loans and deposits. In its first credit card marketing campaign since adopting the Ascential solution, the bank signed 100,000 new customers. DataStage also saved Juniper several hundred thousand dollars in development and staffing costs.

"The ability to transform information into a strategic asset is critical to the success of any young enterprise aiming to win new customers," said Rob Goodman, Director of Data Warehousing at Juniper Bank. "By providing Juniper Bank with fast access to the latest information on our business, DataStage helped us achieve in months a level of success that normally would take years, giving us an outstanding return on our investment."

World-Class Business Intelligence

Juniper integrates all of its crucial customer and marketing information into its data warehouse. The process begins with third-party partners transferring to Juniper raw data files containing the company’s credit card transactions, Web banking, and bill pay services, and online statements. DataStage then seamlessly transforms the data and loads it into Juniper’s UNIX-based
Oracle data warehouse.

"With DataStage, we can quickly integrate all kinds of complex data from multiple platforms and applications," said Goodman.
"We don’t need to worry about the format or file type since DataStage can handle them all."

Once the information is centralized in the data warehouse, marketing executives use Brio Insight and other software to generate reports on the bank’s business. The reports track the channel source and volume of new accounts as well as the success of programs hosted by partners’ Web sites. By analyzing information from its credit card operations, Juniper developed winning cross-selling strategies to target new customers for its banking products and services.

The Ascential data integration engine also enables Juniper to do clickstream analyses on customers’ use of its Web site. Using DataStage to extract data from Oracle tables, the online bank generates detailed usage reports on its Web site services, allowing the company to make decisions on where to invest on improvements. DataStage additionally streamlines Juniper’s analyses of internal operations, including expenses, payroll, and profits and losses, enabling the bank to provide its investors with updated reports on the state of its affairs.

"DataStage gave us the business intelligence to gather all our operational data," said Goodman. "We’re able to rapidly provide our investors with the best information possible to make their decisions—which is a huge benefit to us all."

DataStage further enables Juniper to cost-effectively test and develop new product offers. In the spring of 2001, for example, the bank carried out a 150,000-strong mailing offering a savings bond to customers who were approved for credit before June. "To accomplish this, we had to do a daily extract of data from our data warehouse, format it, and send it to the Federal Reserve so that the bonds could be issued to our customers," said Goodman. "Without DataStage, an operation of this kind would have been very expensive as we would have spent more time and money writing software to create and format the files, delaying the marketing program."

A Comprehensive Information Management Solution

When Goodman and his team began planning Juniper’s information management architecture in August 2000, they had less than three months before the bank’s launch to come up with a solution. While the bank’s strategy, market position, and service offerings had been decided, support for its data processing and data management remained a question.

"What we needed was a quick, effective way of gathering, organizing, integrating, and presenting information," explained Goodman. "Although we had an off-the-shelf data mart application, it was mainly geared towards Web analytics. We wanted to analyze operational and service providers’ data and consolidate it within a single data warehouse so we could use it to advance our business."

Having had previous experience with data integration tools, Goodman and his colleagues narrowed the field to Ascential and Informatica.

"Ascential provided us with a demo copy of DataStage so we could try it for ourselves," said Goodman. "We basically did a due diligence comparison between Ascential and Informatica and then some prototyping of the Ascential solution. The two products’ costs and performance were like night and day."

The team was immediately impressed with DataStage’s superior features, including native mainframe extraction capabilities and strong developer support. During the 30-day trial, they quickly developed most of the routines needed for launch. "Ascential was terrific," said Goodman. "The rep provided plenty of support and worked with us so we could see what DataStage could do—and the system’s price/performance won us over very quickly."

Following the trial, Juniper selected DataStage and immediately began reaping the benefits. "DataStage eliminated the $100 an hour consultant fees we would have had to spend to build a custom data integration tool from scratch," said Goodman. "With DataStage, we can easily maintain, manage, and improve our information management with an IT staff of three instead of six or seven. All told, Ascential saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars in our first year alone."

Impressed with DataStage’s extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) capabilities, Goodman expects to expand Juniper’s use of the system to improve processes and services as the bank continues to grow. For example, the bank plans to build and integrate custom utilities to parse new kinds of information so it can be loaded into its data warehouse.

"DataStage has proved its worth time and time again and will continue to do so as our business matures," said Goodman. "As it stands now, Juniper Bank could never have achieved this level of success without it."

Case Study Source: http://www.dw-institute.com/research/display.asp?id=5408