I attended Huawei’s 2015 global analyst summit in Shenzhen last week and studied its latest strategy for big data innovation. In a change from its previous big data offerings around storage, Huawei has reorganized the data analytics department and focused on infrastructure software that enables big data applications from ISV partners. Mr. Zhu, General Manager of Huawei FusionInsight, talked about FusionInsight, which financial institutions like ICBC and China Merchants Bank use to enhance customer analytics capabilities like customer recognition, segmentation, and marketing automation. Basically, Huawei FusionInsight is a data analytics platform with two major components: 1) a distributed open “database” platform that includes Hadoop, Sparc, and Storm and 2) “middleware” with open APIs to enable multisource data management and analytics.

Chinese financial institutions have a huge amount of legacy transactional data as well as in-motion online and mobile banking data, but they are unable to deal with all of it. With the previous systems of record, financial institutions couldn’t analyze all of this structured and semi-structured data in a unified “data pool.” To solve this problem, they are using Huawei FusionInsight to consolidate multisource data and enable more efficient customer and marketing analytics. Huawei FusionInsight is creating new value in the customer journey for a leading Chinese commercial bank by allowing it to:

  • Win valuable customers. The commercial bank could previously identify premier customers only by looking at the financial assets they had with the bank. To identify more potential customers for its wealth management services, the bank uses FusionInsight to analyze the transactions the customer makes with accounts in other banks, along with online purchase behavior and the locations used frequently to access mobile banking. The bank provided free trials to prospective customers and increased its success rate.
  • Serve customers better. The commercial bank built its credit approval system on credit reports from China Renmin Bank. But these reports have limited information, including only mortgage and credit card usage history. The bank uses FusionInsight to collect and analyze more credit data from utility bills, mobile phone bills, and online purchase information; this has significantly shortened the credit approval period from days to seconds. In the latest credit card application system, consumers can get approval for credit less than 1.5 seconds after they submit their ID card to bank agents.
  • Retain customers with more precise customer engagement. The commercial bank used to send more than 100 million promotional text messages each month to its customers, even though much of the content was irrelevant to certain customer groups. The bank has implemented the analytics platform empowered by FusionInsight and can more precisely segment its customers. This optimized target marketing has cut the number of text messages sent by 80% and saved more than $60,000 per month; more importantly, it has improved the customer experience, as customers can see that the bank understands them before engaging with them.

Huawei FusionInsight is continuing to develop its data analytics capabilities for the financial industry and is expanding to the broader enterprise market, even though it has only a small presence in the Chinese analytics supplier market. If you want more details about customer analytics vendors in China, Forrester clients can read my report: The Customer Analytics Market In China.