In 2006, CTBC faced significant IT challenges when planning and executing its business expansion strategies, notably how to efficiently integrate and standardize its current and new banking systems.

CTBC carefully assessed the potential pitfalls of changing its banking system, then began implementing a pivotal solution: TIBCO® Connected Intelligence enabled creating a standard service infrastructure with reusable services to simplify integration of complex systems.

Reduced Complexity, Faster Services Delivery

The architecture was first deployed for branches throughout Taiwan. Then, in a second phase of integration from 2009 to 2011, the bank expanded the integration to cover nine branches in China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, New York, Singapore, and Vietnam. Building on the platform, CTBC deployed over 100 new international financial exchange services, such as deposit and loan services for corporate customers, factoring and cash management, and credit facilities across markets.

In 2013, the bank began applying its overseas branch model-bank strategy to other subsidiaries of CTBC Financial Holding Company, the first being PT Bank CTBC Indonesia. "The model bank strategy is critical to our future development and global expansion," said Hank Chen, vice president of information and strategy, CTBC Bank. "It reduced the efforts required for customization and the complexity of integrating our core banking system with the subsidiary banking system. Most importantly, standardization means easier management and faster responses to changing business requirements as we expand into different markets."

Today, the bank's TIBCO infrastructure supports a burgeoning ecosystem comprising retail and institutional banking, and credit card and payment businesses. It connects over 105 systems including core and internet banking along with credit-card, loan, and lottery systems, workflow, and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) across disparate platforms. It standardizes communications from a mix of different message formats and protocols.

Savings from Service Reuse

Initial integrations using the TIBCO platform allowed quickly building and deploying over 500 new services, with over 30 percent reuse and cost savings of 34 percent. Since 2016, services increased from 1,000 to 1,100 with 36 percent reuse. As use of the integration platform increased, CTBC found additional time and cost savings. "Thanks to TIBCO, we found there was a clear reduction in the development effort required for changing the backend systems," said Chen. "Subsidiaries would probably have applications differing from those on the core system, but we were able to reuse 50 percent of the services built, so we can maximize returns on our investment in TIBCO, whilst accelerating service delivery and boosting customer satisfaction.

Increased Customer Satisfaction

CTBC's Connected Intelligence Platform supports high throughput. Before the integration, using point-to-point connections, retail internet banking transactions were about 150,000 daily. In 2014, using the platform, they soared to 1.2 million, an eight-fold increase, and by 2018, daily internet retail banking transaction volume reached 5.2 million.

Chen is keenly aware that e-banking plays a vital role for CTBC in acquiring new customers in global markets. Customers now benefit from a wealth of real-time services. In addition to IVR through which they can retrieve automated banking information by phone, real-time services include: inquiry handling for data aggregation, account summaries, global limits, and inward/outward remittances; bulk payments and remit transfers; beneficiary and transaction-status notifications; and event-driven communications between applications.

To ensure that CTBC continues to maximize benefits, Chen is leading his team to establish a center of excellence. "As the implementation across business units gathers momentum, it makes sense to build a CoE that can bring standards across the organization along with an appropriate governance model," Chen added.