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National City Builds "Transactional
Data Store"
Jeanne O'Brien
Bank Systems + Technology
AUGUST, 1999: Expanding quickly and needing up-to-the-minute
information about customers, National City Corp. has assembled a "transactional data store" to capture
daily transactional data that could aid decision-making and cross-selling.
The "hybrid" data warehouse - built in conjunction with Daman Consulting, a provider of data warehousing
and enterprise application integration solutions - supplies the $85.5 billion bank with a fresh feed of customer
transactional data by providing a snapshot of recent activity on top of past banking patterns.
"NCC is looking for good matches between existing customers and products," said Dan Shingler, a National
City spokesman. "In addition, we place the highest importance on making sure that sensitive customer information
remain inside NCC at all times."
Besides bolstering cross-selling, National City wanted detailed information on the channels that customers were
using to access banking functions in order to make informed decisions about ATM use, branch use and areas where
consolidation might be possible, said Alfredo Ramirez, managing partner of Austin, Texas-based Daman.
Conventional data warehouses operate on historic data that's often several months old, Ramirez noted. That has
unearthed the need for daily transactional data, which in turn drove the development of the transactional data
store (TDS). "This TDS is totally different from a traditional data warehouse," he explained. "It
was designed to be separate from the enterprise data warehouse because of the volume of data that they have."
National City initially wanted to have 24 months of daily data, but disk storage difficulties cut that down to
less than a year of data, he added.
Developed by Daman with the assistance of Compaq Computer consultants and National City IT personnel, the TDS is
a specialized database that melds decision-support capabilities with information that is much more timely than
the data usually found in data warehouses.
"Daman Consulting came up with a very creative solution, an architectural compromise between an operational
data store and a historical repository like a data warehouse," according to Greg Komar, vice president of
technology and planning for the Cleveland-based bank.
The TDS is linked with National City's enterprise data warehouse to provide a broad picture of customer information,
behavior and purchases, and the link appears seamless to those accessing the data, Ramirez said. Thus, information
about who the customer is can be stored in the enterprise data warehouse, while data about what they do is held
in the TDS, he explained. The process of daily aggregations of data takes three hours, trimming overhead and freeing
system resources for other chores.
"Many of our retail business areas have strategic plans to use the new TDS information," Komar stated.
