Challenges

• Avoid disruption to up to 6 million credit and debit card ATM, POS, internet, and mobile transactions processed monthly by the bank, should the platform that supports its BASE24 payment engine experience unplanned downtime
• Enable the bank’s 900,000 customers to continue to use their debit and credit cards for cash withdrawals, shopping, online purchases, and internet banking with near-zero downtime during system enhancements and upgrades
• Analyze real-time cardholder transaction data to identify transaction patterns, detect unusual activity, and rectify potential network problems before they have an impact on service quality
• Monitor the operational status of Erste Bank Hungary’s network of 450 ATMs in near-real-time to ensure rapid fault detection and repair, and to prompt replenishment of cash reserves
• Avoid the need to engage expensive BASE24 specialists to write reports on transactional data extracted from the payment engine

Solutions

• Used Oracle GoldenGate to replicate cardholder transactional data from the BASE24 production system to a backup BASE24 machine located six miles away
• Ensured near-real-time hot backup of cardholder transactional data by ensuring that the bank can capture changes from transaction logs as they occur and replicate them to the backup site with only a few seconds of latency
• Benefited from Oracle GoldenGate’s dynamic data integration capabilities to preserve consistency and integrity of cardholder transaction data during the move from the production to the backup system
• Preserved production system performance and dynamic scalability during data replication, which enabled the company to ensure zero downtime and performance degradation for customer transactions, such as cash withdrawals, online shopping, and internet banking, even during peak periods
• Eliminated the risk of downtime following an outage at the primary site, which would have incurred financial losses for Erste Bank Hungary and had a negative impact on its reputation and customer satisfaction levels
• Achieved major system upgrades, which required migrating 10 gigabytes of data between source and target systems with only one hour of downtime by using Oracle GoldenGate to synchronize data between the primary and secondary BASE24 systems
• Offloaded live transactional data from the Intel Itanium platform running BASE24 using Oracle GoldenGate and replicated it to Oracle Database 11g for near-real-time credit and debit card transactional activity analysis
• Used Oracle GoldenGate to eliminate the need to place additional processing loads on the BASE24 system, which would risk performance degradation and subsequent impact on customer service
• Enabled the bank to refresh transactional data that is extracted as changes occur without having a negative impact on system performance, instead of refreshing it just once daily during nonbusy periods
• Extracted live data continuously from the ATM monitoring tool in BASE24 into Oracle Database 11g to alert ATM maintenance teams when any of the 450 cash-dispensing machines located at bank branches, shopping centers, hypermarkets, and Hungarian Post Office branches need to be replenished or repaired
• Benefited from near real-time intelligence on ATM status and operations to refill or repair machines in minutes, instead of hours, which minimizes inconvenience to cardholders and business loss
• Cut costs by using developers with Oracle Database skills, who are more plentiful and less expensive than BASE24 experts, to carry out analysis and reporting on customer transaction data, such as volume of transactions, average amount, and spend per customer
• Reduced storage costs by offloading and storing historical transaction data from Intel Itanium to Oracle Database 11g

Why Oracle

Erste Bank Hungary chose Oracle GoldenGate for its ability to provide nonintrusive, dynamic replication of its transactional data between heterogeneous systems while preserving system performance through its low overhead on the source and target databases.

“We preferred Oracle GoldenGate for its unrivalled ability to deliver nonstop replication in a high availability environment between Oracle databases running on Itanium and from Itanium to x86 architectures. The price/performance it offers is unmatched,” said Gabor Toth, head of card support department, bankcard operations, Erste Bank Hungary Zrt.

Implementation Process

Erste Bank Hungary carried out the Oracle GoldenGate implementation in only nine days, using its in-house IT resources.

“Oracle GoldenGate does not require complex programming or installations, which made it relatively simple to implement,” said Gabor Toth, Head of Card Support Department, Bankcard Operations, Erste Bank Hungary Zrt.