The coronavirus pandemic has changed the banking industry, increasing the demand for digital banking capabilities to ensure daily transactions are done seamlessly.

Union Bank of the Philippines (UnionBank), consistently been recognised as one of Asia’s leading companies and ranking among the country’s top universal banks in terms of profitability and efficiency, has tapped SAP for a new banking model that would support customer-centric services.

As a pioneering financial institution in digital banking, UnionBank aims to pioneer the “Data Science Factory” model in Southeast Asia’s financial sector with SAP Data Intelligence and improve all its operations’ end-to-end perspective.

Centering on Customers

Speaking about the latest SAP digital technology adoption centred on customers, David Hardoon, UnionBank Data and Artificial Intelligence Senior Adviser, explained:

“We need to ensure that there is strong governance behind our processes, that the data-building has been validated and verified; whatever solutions or services we deploy are of the highest regard to fulfill our responsibilities to our customers.”

UnionBank adopted SAP Data Intelligence to provide the necessities the bank needs to create and integrate the digital model into their systems. 

Aside from providing customer-centric services, equally important is the digital bank model’s vital function on the governance and management of internal processes. The solution offers the relevant tools needed by tellers, management, and other internal staff in performing their duties and delivering excellent services to customers.

Commenting on UnionBank’s digital banking technology enhancement, Edler Panlilio, SAP Philippines Managing Director, said:

“SAP Data Intelligence’s ability to gather and interpret data has helped UnionBank to better understand their customers and provide a more convenient and comfortable experience not only for their customers but also to their employees.” 

More About SAP Data Intelligence 

SAP Data Intelligence is a comprehensive data management solution that connects, discovers, enriches, and orchestrates disjointed data assets into actionable business insights at an enterprise scale. The solution meets challenges such as managing data stored in multiple applications across complex, hybrid landscapes and mastering traditional data integration.

The solution enables the creation of data warehouses from heterogeneous enterprise data, simplifies the management of IoT data streams, and facilitates scalable machine learning. SAP Data Intelligence enables organisations to leverage their business applications to become an intelligent enterprise and provides a holistic, unified way to manage, integrate, and process all of their enterprise data. 

Below are some of the key highlights of SAP Data Intelligence:

• Integrate any data, solving the data deluge program
• Reuse any engine and orchestrate any SAP or third-party data processing engine
• Democratise intelligence by making machine learning easier to implement, scale, operationalise, and govern
• Ensure data quality by discovering, preparing, and governing data assets in the same tool
• Deploy on any mix of hyperscalers, whether hybrid or on-premise

Gartner named SAP as a Leader in the 2020 Gartner “Magic Quadrant for Metadata Management Solutions” based on its “ability to execute” and “completeness of vision” with the company’s metadata management solutions, including SAP Data Intelligence, SAP Information Steward, and SAP PowerDesigner software.

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The SAP HANA platform is a high-performance in-memory database that was launched in November 2010. It is the data foundation of the SAP Business Technology Platform.

SAP HANA accelerates data-driven real-time decisions and actions with the widest range of advanced analytics for multi-model data, on-premises and in the cloud, supporting all workloads. It provides low-cost solutions for big data challenges faced by companies.

According to SAP Korea, 4 out of 5 large companies are using the SAP HANA platform in South Korea and more than 53,000 customers use it worldwide.

Seong-yeol Lee, CEO of SAP Korea, notes,

“Many large companies in [South] Korea, including Hyundai Motor Group, are our clients.”

Establishing an SAP data center to support SAP HANA

During the virtual event, SAP Korea announced an important strategic move to encourage local customers to adopt SAP solutions in their core operations. 

The company unveiled its plans of building the country’s first SAP data center to support the SAP HANA platform by the second quarter of 2021. SAP data centers provide a reliable infrastructure for customers and meet the highest security standards to data safe and secure.

SAP Korea said that with this, it will be better positioned in providing optimized SAP solutions to local customers to help them extract business value from their data more quickly and accurately. 

According to SAP Korea, through the establishment of the country’s very first SAP data center, it will be able to meet the requirements related to South Korea’s data security and data sovereignty—which are highly regulated in the country. 

Lee Seong-yeol, CEO of SAP Korea, said,

“It has been 10 years since the launch of the high-performance in-memory database SAP HANA, developed with the technology of Korean researchers, and I am very excited. It will be an important milestone for [South] Korea. SAP Korea will support domestic partners as well as various companies in the post-COVID-19 era to convert essential customer data into valuable assets.”

Currently, SAP data centers are present in the following regions:

• Europe (Frankfurt, Germany)
• Oceania (Sydney, Australia)
• United States of America (Northern Virginia)
• East Asia (Tokyo, Japan)
• South Asia (Singapore)
• South America (São Paulo, Brazil)

In addition to the establishment of the SAP Korea data center, SAP has also said that the following availability is planned for 2021:

• Europe (Amsterdam, Netherlands)
• United States West (Washington)

About SAP Korea

SAP Korea Limited was founded in 1995. The company engaged in providing enterprise application software. The company offers solutions including Analytics, Content and Collaboration, Customer Relationship Management, Data Management, Enterprise Resource Planning, Financial Management, Human Capital Management, Product Lifecycle Management, Supply Chain Management, Supplier Relationship Management , Technology Platform, among others.

SAP Korea Limited operates as a subsidiary of SAP SE and is based in Seoul, South Korea.

The post SAP Korea celebrates 10 years of SAP HANA platform appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

SAP BW4/HANA will be available in traditional on-premise deployment, as well as via Amazon Web Services and the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud service. Other cloud deployments options are expected to be available in the future.

According to SAP’s announcement, the new solution will provide a “simpler and more way of achieving real-time analytics through a new foundation for logical data warehousing that provides the interactivity with historical and live data residing in a diverse IT landscape”.

SAP BW/4HANA will provide an open data warehousing environment for rapid application development, a modern user interface, multi temperature data handling and support for cloud-ready offerings. The platform will offer a more unified and streamlined data warehouse object model, as well as simplified governance features to enable agile data warehouse development.

BW4/HANA, to be released to customers on 7 September, will provide the ability to connect with the SAP BusinessObjects Cloud solution, as well as built-in connectivity to SAP Digital Boardroom. As well as these cloud capabilities, the platform will also be able to integrate live streaming and time-series sensor data collected from Internet of Things environments.

The platform can be implemented as a prebuilt data warehouse for applications such as those based on SAP S/4HANA, or a more standard SQL-based development environment. SAP is also promising an easy transition for customers with current SAP Business Warehouse implementations.

“The digitisation of business requires a modern approach to data management, data processing and analytics that can handle any data source and type in real time,” said Bernd Leukert, member of the Executive Board, products and innovation, SAP SE. “With SAP BW/4HANA and our collaboration with AWS, the leading cloud infrastructure provider, we are providing customers with an easy-to-consume next-generation data warehouse platform that will further accelerate their journey toward becoming a live digital business.”

Fairfax Media has already implemented the new platform.

“As an early adopter of SAP BW/4HANA running on AWS, we reduced our end-to-end production time by 50 per cent, allowing us to deliver a powerful new analytics platform with minimal upfront investment in just three months,” said Diego Lombardini, head of finance systems, Fairfax Media. “To support our constantly changing business, we now have an extremely flexible, highly scalable cloud environment that is capable of future-proofing our business.”

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