Data Integrity is Key to Project Success

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Comerica Inc. is a multi-state financial services provider, headquartered in Detroit, with operations in California, Florida and other states, as well as Canada and Mexico. It is the seventeenth largest banking company in the U.S. with total assets of $51 billion, and holds the top spot among the nation's 50 top bank holding companies in commercial loans as a percentage of assets. The company also operates an investment services affiliate, Munder Capital Management, and was tapped by Forbes Magazine as one of the best big companies in America last January.

The company has long been viewed as a leader in customer relationship management (CRM) efforts and has now implemented an ambitious Enterprise Customer Information System (E-CIS), which serves as a comprehensive, enterprise-wide information system for managing all of the bank's customer relationships, products and service information.

The seeds for the E-CIS system were planted in the mid-1980s, when Comerica implemented the Hogan Application System, a vertical banking software package now owned by the Computer Science Corp. The bank purchased the Hogan application to use in its new account area.
Shortly after they implemented the Hogan package, officers in the Comerica branch system realized that they would like to know if customers had additional relationships with the bank. "At that point," said Barbara Campbell, vice president of Comerica Bank and application manager of the E-CIS, "all they could see was if a customer had a checking account, a savings account, or perhaps an IRA." So the company began to interface what Campbell called their "silo" applications such as mortgages, consumer loans and revolving credit applications. The effort was directed at the bank's retail customers.

Overcoming Silos
In 1996, senior management approved the implementation of an enterprise-wide customer information database. A study had revealed that Comerica had a collection of duplicate customer databases being set up all over the organization. "We recognized the need to bring the application information to a central point," Campbell said. Campbell, who has been with Comerica for 37 years and has worked on the customer information system since 1984, was given a seven-figure budget and IT resources to create a central repository for customer information, which would draw information from applications across the organization.

Her first step was to prioritize. As part of the study that led to the project's authorization, the team had talked to business side of the bank to identify the data elements for an E-CIS database. "We got the buy-in from those business area managers to say that if we put the data out there, they would use it," Campbell said. She decided to focus primarily on the commercial side of the bank's activities, such as commercial loans, letters of credit, dealer leasing, trust, and merchant services.

Within two years, Campbell and her team, which included Kellie Powell, the IT project lead working with the applications, had created a central data repository. But it wasn't easy. "With our budget and time frame," Campbell said. "Nobody would pre-scrub the data before it was given to us." So she created a basic customer profile for E-CIS including information such as name, address and account number. Other information could be displayed if the source application would provide it. If not, the E-CIS would simply provide a link that indicated that the customer does have a relationship to different entities within the organization.

Data Integrity
As Campbell integrated the data from the source applications, she also developed processes to manage the application from a data integrity standpoint. "I had to focus on how I was going to scrub this data and get to the single view of the customer," she said.

In 1997, the company moved from a VSM database to an IBM DB2 running on a System/390 computer. If the underlying applications were not going to cleanse the data before it was passed to the E-CIS, Campbell knew that she would need tools in place to insure the integrity of the data. "The problem we are faced with even today is that when we get the batch feed from 14 different legacy applications, when a customer opens an account, unless we match on the name, address, or social security number, the E-CIS ends up creating a new customer record, and I potentially have duplicates," Campbell said.

So she has implemented both manual and automated processes to try to eliminate duplicates, and she is studying solutions that would allow branch office personnel to access E-CIS records prior to opening new accounts, once again to eliminate duplicates. "The thing nobody is ever taught is that when you sign a document, you should sign your legal name," Campbell observed. "You should never use short names or nicknames when applying for an ATM card or ordering checks."

To address the data integrity issues and implement customer matching processes, Campbell turned to what is now called the i/Lytics suite of products from Innovative Systems Inc. The i/Lytics suite includes a change management module for cleansing, standardizing, formatting, and repairing batch data as well as data quality and data linking modules for matching and eliminating duplicates, and linking associated records. "I was being challenged at that point about how accurate the E-CIS was even though we only had deposits, revolving and consumer loans, and mortgages in it," Campbell said.