Challenges

• Implement an internet system that is managed by KB Kookmin Card, rather than shared and restricted by the parent company’s internet banking system
• Expand and offer new, innovative lifestyle and financial services to customers
• Deploy the system without service interruption and minimize the cost and time required to transfer data to a new database
• Establish a one-source multibrowsing environment that allows customers to access the same data, using related Websites and cell phone and PC platforms
• Develop easy-to-modify applications that can be quickly adapted or expanded, to meet requirements for increased use of mobile internet devices and platforms
• Link the internet system with external parties, such as travel agents and airlines, to improve lifestyle services available to customers
• Provide a highly stable and secure payment service
• Ensure system availability and strengthen real-time data backup and recovery capabilities

Solutions

• Increased Website visitors and sales by 16%, by establishing an independent internet system that provides financial and lifestyle services, such as insurance, loans, travel booking, and golf reservations
• Prevented a revenue loss of around US$65 million and helped avoid damage to the company’s reputation by maintaining quality customer services while implementing the new system, rather than shutting services down for three days
• Ensured the internet service system remained fully operational even when 15% of the 120,000 daily Web users accessed it simultaneously
• Modified new mobile Web applications in less than three days, using a combined Web application method, rather than taking take two weeks to add a single new page or service, using a slower development method
• Used Oracle WebLogic Server, Enterprise Edition to become the first company in Korea’s financial industry to offer open, Web-based services
• Provided clients with a consistent user experience when accessing online financial and lifestyle services, and improved Web data management, by establishing one-source, multi-use data
• Enhanced services for customers and promoted credit card membership by developing new applications that allow sales staff to compare card services on their mobile devices and recommend those that best fit their customers’ needs
• Enabled sales staff to easily check their sales performance in near real time using newly created mobile applications
• Expanded lifestyle services by enabling real-time links to data from external parties, such as travel agents and airlines
• Launched previously unavailable exclusive services, such as “Today’s Shopping”, a golf reservation and social commerce service
• Operated a stable payment service without any issues or unscheduled system downtime
• Increased system stability by using Oracle Real Application Clusters’ dual nodes and enabling active-active backup of each server
• Achieved 100% system availability, ensuring customers are always able to access financial and lifestyle applications

Why Oracle

KB Kookmin Card wanted to implement a system that was scalable, flexible, and stable, and would support mobile platforms. After considering a number of solutions that would allow fast and stable system implementation without interrupting services, KB Kookmin Card decided on Oracle WebLogic Server, Enterprise Edition and Oracle Database 11g.

“The company has been using Oracle’s database and WebLogic Server solutions for more than 10 years and has faith in their stability and performance,” said Jeong Bo-gil, team leader, IT development, KB Kookmin Card. “Service expandability and flexibility were also important to us and we regarded the Oracle solutions favorably for those aspects, too.”

In addition, the company was impressed by Oracle’s hybrid columnar compression and partitioning technologies, which will provide performance and cost benefits when it expands the services in the future.

Implementation Process

In August 2011, KB Kookmin Card implemented the mobile infrastructure to underpin the new internet services system. The company then deployed Oracle WebLogic Server, Enterprise Edition and Oracle Database 11g in February 2012. Within a month, the in-house IT team had collected and applied improvements and requests from each department, linked various new projects, and transferred the company’s data to Oracle Database 11g. The system went live in March 2012.

“Thanks to Oracle’s stable and professional self-tuning service, the implementation of our internet services system went smoothly,” said Bo-gil. “We are very satisfied with the Oracle products, and the system has been operating without any issues since it went live.”

Resources

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