Summarise the data types that Deutsche Bank collects and how they are used for customer relationship management. Deutsche Bank is one of the largest financial institutions in Europe, with assets under management worth 100 billion euros (£60 billion). It operates in seven different countries under different names, although the company is considering consolidating into a single brand operating as a pan-European bank.

In 1999 its chairman, Dr Walther, said the company had to improve its cost-to-revenue ratio to 70 per cent from 90 per cent and add 10 million customers over the next four to eight years. That would be achieved by increasing revenues through growing customer value by cross- and up-selling, reducing costs through more targeted communications, and by getting more new customers based on meaningful data analysis.

Central to this programme has been the introduction of an enterprise-wide database, analysis and campaign management system called DataSmart. This has brought significant changes to its marketing processes and effectiveness. Achieving this new IT infrastructure has been no mean feat – Deutsche Bank has 73 million customers, of which 800,000 are on-line and 190,000 use its online brokerage service, it has 19,300 employees, 1250 branches and 250 financial centres, plus three call centres supporting Deutsche Bank 24, its telebanking service. It also has e-commerce alliances with Yahoo!, e-Bay and AOL.

‘DataSmart works on four levels – providing a technical infrastructure across the enterprise, consolidating data, allowing effective data analyses and segmentations, and managing multi-channel marketing campaigns’, says Jens Fruehling, head of the marketing database automation project, Deutsche Bank 24.

The new database runs on the largest Sun server in Europe with 20 processors, 10 Gb of RAM and 5 terabytes of data storage. It is also mirrored. The software used comprises Oracle for the database, Prime Response for campaign management, SAS for data mining, Cognos for OLAP reporting, plus a data extraction, transformation, modelling and loading tool.