China Merchants Bank Chooses IAM to Meet Credit Card Crunch

China Merchants Bank's thriving "All-in-One Card" credit card and rapidly growing online retail banking business is the result of creative marketing supported by extremely successful technology-driven development initiatives. China Merchants Bank, in cooperation with Olympic sponsor Visa, launching a credit card with the Chinese character of "He" highlighting "harmony" (he), the same theme as the spectacular and globally well-received opening ceremony in Beijing, is just a recent example of how the bank grew this segment of its consumer credit business from 5 million credit cards on issue in 2006 to over 20 million entering 2008 and today is the largest issuer of credit cards in China.
The dilemma accompanying this success, however, was China Merchants Bank found its CardLinK credit card application was hard pressed to turn a daily processing cycle on schedule. "Our business is growing very fast. Business data is growing fast as well. So, [naturally] batch jobs, take longer," explains Mr. Tao Ming Ming, China Merchants Bank (CMB)'s Mainframe Systems Manager.
Looking for new ideas to handle the growing overload of its CardLinK credit card processing application, China Merchants Bank found its solution in IAM, a VSAM application performance enhancement solution, from US-based INNOVATION Data Processing.
"Already providing high performance throughput for customers around the globe, as a transparent performance accelerator for VSAM CICS and batch applications under z/OS, INNOVATION is extremely proud to have China Merchants Bank as an IAM customer in China," said Thomas J. Meehan, INNOVATION Data Processing, Vice President Technology Advancement.
With the credit card market one of the fastest-growing segments of its consumer credit businesses, "Batch jobs couldn't be finished in the batch window," said Mr. Tao. "Jobs took too much time accessing the VSAM files which they were accessing frequently."
"Using IAM we can reduce the executing time, it is easy to use and we don't need to make a lot of changes to our applications," added Mr. Tao.
The CMB IT department supports the bank's credit card business with CardLinK running under the z/OS operating system on an IBM z9 mainframe processor with IBM storage. CardLinK, from Atos Origin, a leading international IT services provider, is a modular system that supports all the principal functions of payment card management -- application, issuing, acquiring, authorization and collection. Running on the IBM mainframe platform CardLinK provides the bank with a high degree of flexibility, interfacing with Visa, MasterCard and JCB networks to ensure the bank meets the demanding business requirements of the payment card industry.
Consulting with application specialists from Atos Origin's Beijing China Headquarters, China Merchants Bank chose IAM from INNOVATION as a solution to the undesirable situation they had found themselves facing, after evaluation tests showed IAM cut CardLink job run times by an average of 52%, reducing elapsed run times from between 20% to 80%. "IAM is a good tool for z/OS. It can improve the performance of VSAM processing and reduce I/O when a big job is running. Installation [of IAM] is quite easy. It is easy to use and we don't need to make a lot of changes to our applications. As the result, [using IAM] we can reduce the executing time for critical batch jobs," Mr. Tao concluded.

About China Merchants Bank
Founded on April 8, 1987 with its head office in Shenzhen, as the first commercial bank wholly owned by public shareholders, today China Merchants Bank is China's sixth-largest bank by assets, widely regarded as China's most profitable commercial bank, has won awards and recognition from Euromoney, The Asian Banker and Finance Asia magazine among other press organizations as 'The Best Bank in China', 'The Best Retail Bank in China', one of 'the Top 10 Public Companies in China', is ranked in the top 200 among 'the world 1000 banks' by British financial journal "The Banker" and is the largest credit card issuer in China.

About INNOVATION Data Processing
INNOVATION Data Processing is a single source for business resiliency solutions providing high performance, data protection, non-disruptive business continuance and privacy information protection solutions, to thousands of enterprise customers around the world for over 35 years. INNOVATION Data Processing is represented in Asia/Pacific by Computer Supervisory Services based in Sydney, Australia. For further information on INNOVATION Data Processing and its offerings email sales@fdrinnovation.com, visit http://www.innovationdp.fdr.com or contact Computer Supervisory Services at +61-2-9665-1104 or email information@css.au.com.
IAM is a service mark, trademarks and/or registered trademark of Innovation Data Processing Corporation. IBM and z/OS are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation. All other service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.