In 2009, the company’s credit process changed substantially. After briefly looking at alternative solutions, DBS chose to work with Progress, TIBCO, and Oracle to build a new credit determination process. “Progress Corticon gave us the ability to change the way the credit scoring is done in DBS,” says Sakthidaran.
The barriers to automating a complex process in a knowledge-rich environment are substantial. Many corporations like DBS have decision-intensive business processes with complex decision logic that must be applied at a high transaction rate. Thus, they are challenged with both getting the logic right and processing that logic fast enough to meet the required transaction throughput. And, whether decisions are made by people or by software, they must be made consistently and accurately every single time. With large sums of money involved, the stakes are particularly high, especially in a credit-reporting environment.
To master that challenge, in 2009 DBS adopted Progress Corticon Business Rules Management System (BRMS), with Enterprise Data Connector, as the cornerstone of its new system. DBS also employed TIBCO BusinessWorks and TIBCO iProcess Decisions along with an Oracle database as part of the solution. With eight scoring models, each with hundreds of rules, and hundreds of factors that go into a score, the system took several months for the DBS team to develop, but the results were worth the time spent, according to Sakthidaran. “With Progress Corticon we have been able to move at the speed of the market by implementing new rules to reflect new realities when needed. Corticon makes it easy to adopt and deploy these changes.”
Designed to serve internal customers, “Once set up by DBS, the Progress Corticon rules engine can read data from database tables, which is enabling us to change the key factors in the tables using online workflow modules,” explains Sakthidaran. “The rules that we use now are based directly on credit data and customer data. With our Corticon-based process we are capturing all the parameters. Furthermore, based on our data, we can change criteria on the fly; we don’t have to wait months to update the process,” he adds.
In the credit reporting system, the rules themselves come from a combination of regulatory sources such as the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and statistical analysis from the DBS Credit Portfolio Analytics Department.
Now that Corticon is powering the credit rules process, DBS routinely passes both internal and external audits by the MAS. This not only reduces their own credit risk, it also reduces the amount of funds which once had to be held in reserve to cover potential bad loans.