Taiwan’s CTBC Bank is in the forefront of enhancing its tech prowess:
CTBC Bank, or China Trust Business Bank, is one of the largest privately owned banks in Taiwan. Set up in 1966, it is ranked the No 1 most valuable brand in the country’s financial industry. It has some 300 service outlets in 14 countries and 152 branches in Taiwan, the Americas, Canada, Japan, India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Singapore besides mainland China. It is the first bank to issue a credit card in Taiwan and set up a customer service center.
The bank has a major presence in Greater China, helping businesses in the Yangtze River Delta Economic Zone and the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macau Greater Bay Area, with Shanghai at the heart of its expansion.
TCS TO HELP DIGITIZE
CTBC Bank has recently concluded an agreement with Tata Consultancy Services to help it on the digital transformation of its services. TCS is providing its banking operation system TCS BaNCS to streamline the IT environment in the bank and help it offer new digital experiences to its clients. The bank is now enabled to offer specialized financial services spanning retail, wealth and corporate banking business units. In addition, TCS-developed systems will support the bank’s trade financing and international remittance services.
The BaNCS core banking solution allows the bank to provide customer services round-the-clock and automated solutions for loans, deposits, international and domestic remittances, payments/collection, facility limits and collaterals across both consumer and corporate banking businesses.
Since BaNCS has a microservices-based, cloud-native design, it will also help the bank to take up its digital strategy, spot new business opportunities and expand its presence.
The bank’s CTO Titan Chia said in press statement that TCS BaNCS was selected for the digital transformation initiatives in order to help the bank differentiate its offerings by “providing contextual, innovative solutions across banking and wealth management”.
DR SITE ON CLOUD
CTBC Bank has built a private cloud infrastructure based on the VMware Cloud Foundation multi-cloud platform. Subsequently it started using VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (VCDR) architecture and is now integrating VCDR into its BCP to enhance the resilience and flexibility of its information services.
As its own data center is now in the public cloud, the bank has been able to migrate applications without changing their IP addresses. Since VCDR operates in a multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environment, the bank is able to choose DR data center locations from local sites in Taiwan to global public cloud data centers based on its needs.
INDUSTRY ECOSYSTEM BASED
The bank has built a range of payment ecosystems as part of its digital transformation. These are essentially industry ecosystems as the bank has partnered with leaders in various business sectors and these ecosystems not only integrate channels and services, but offer reward points. Customers can make payments and earn reward points, which in turn encourages future transactions within the ecosystem, creating a reward-based economy.
The bank has aligned with Apple to provide 2 solutions – iOS T2P (Tap to Phone) digital payment product outside the US, and a Phygital Banking Platform offering contact-free services to customers in the bank’s branches using Apple Messages for Business.
The bank is also an early user of blockchain technology and it is one of the participants in Contour, a trade finance blockchain.
The bank has recently launched a digital SME loan platform, which is a 24-hour online application service for sole proprietorship or partnership micro-enterprises and regular companies. It uses several patented technologies and processes for remote verification, which is a contactless procedure.
The bank is also an early user of AI. It has integrated AI tools into its Home Bank app to launch several features, including smart search, wealth management service recommendations, remote wealth management and AI dialogue. These features provide custom search results and recommendations based on customers’ needs as well as remote wealth management consultations and real-time assistance.
NEW AI-BASED SOLUTIONS
The bank has entered into an agreement with National Taiwan University to use the latter’s AI technology for better customer services. The bank provides anonymized data to NTU’s AI Research Center and the IoX Center – which focuses on Internet of Things – for research on NL understanding, emotion recognition and microexpression reading. Work on emotion recognition and microexpression reading is expected to help the bank staff read a client’s feelings or emotional state to provide better services. The bank expects that the research will result in a new language-understanding solution.
The bank has identified a strategy whereby it will provide optimized product and customer experience to support its business objectives, ‘have forward thinking innovation and long-term planning’ and ‘focus on IT transformation engineering to empower business competitiveness’. In implementing this strategy, it has emphasized that it will focus on end-to-end digitization, make effective use of AI and blockchain for creating applications in various financial fields, work on innovative business models and undertake sustained modernization of the core IT systems.
This article has been compiled based on publicly available information on the web, particularly the bank’s own website.
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