HDFC Bank Ltd. is a new-generation, private sector commercial bank in India. Founded in 1994 by India's leading housing company, HDFC Bank initially focused on corporate banking. Within only 1.5 years HDFC Bank was established as the premier bank in this segment, forming relationships with the top 200 corporations in India.

Since mid-1996, HDFC Bank expanded into retail banking in a big way, rolling out various products such as international debit cards, electronic bill presentment and payments, loans against shares, auto loans, personal loans, credit cards apart from value-added savings, and current and term deposits. Today HDFC Bank has 4,000 employees and 1.9 million retail customers; and is adding 2,000 new customers every day. With assets of $2.6 billion, it is one of India's leading private sector banks and has averaged return on equity of 23 percent annually over the past five years.

HDFC bank started focussing on its relationship with customers and initiated the creation of a centralized data-base of its customers as early as 2000.

The challenges before HDFC Bank were:

• Combining data present across three to four disparate systems
• Bringing together customer data resulting from the merger of HDFC Bank with `Times Bank', another medium-sized bank.
• Creating customer profiles based on address and non-address information
• Putting systems in place that would ensure improved data-quality at source level.
• Managing all the above on a large Data-size of close to 3 million in a time-bound manner.

HDFC BANK chose Spectrum Business Support Limited to provide the Data-cleansing and Deduplication solution through DataFIX. As part of the project, Spectrum Business Support Limited undertook the following tasks:

• Data-cleansing of Customer Data received from various Source systems including Savings Account, Deposits, Depository Accounts, Loan Accounts - all running on different platforms and dealing with different customer information
• Converting and standardizing the data into standard name and address formats
• Enhancing address information like Missing ZIP codes, District and State information and qualitative information like gender and title.
• Identification of unique Individual Relationships, Households and Corporate Groups and generation of Unique IDs through the process of de-duplication using several rules.
• Affixing non-address information to the unique relationships based on pre-defined rules.
• Providing Consultancy services for improving data-cleansing at Source and during Data-entry.

The output of DataFIX was the input to the CRM Project being initiated by the bank. The bank's CRM implementation was being done through a data-warehouse project provided by i-flex solutions ltd. These two taken together enabled the customer's product holding, transaction history, channel usage, demographic profile and satisfaction, along with his profitability, to be mapped and data-mined. This in turn enabled HDFC Bank to deliver the right product at the right time, through the right channel to the customer. All of this, to keep him/her happy and satisfied.

HDFC Bank's own personnel conducted various tests and found that de-duplication after cleansing was atleast 6 times higher than before cleansing.

The Bank has expanded considerably opening up new branches and ATM centers rapidly. HDFC Bank has also got one of the most popular internet banking services today. All this would not have been possible had not the Bank taken the early lead in identifying customer satisfaction as critical and using IT to speed the process.

The bank's success has not gone unnoticed in the banking and business community. In the year 2000, leading financial magazine Forbes Global named HDFC Bank in its list of "The 300 Best Small Companies" in the world and as one of the "20 for 2001" best small companies in the world. The Economic Times has chosen HDFC Bank for The Economic Times Award for Emerging Company of the Year 2000-01. London-based Euromoney gave HDFC Bank the award for "Best Bank - India" in 1999, "Best Domestic Bank" in India in 2000, and "Best Bank in India" in 2001. Leading Indian business magazine Business India named it "India's Best Bank" in 2000.