HSBC has signed a three-year deal worth US$2 million with business intelligence software firm SAS Institute.
The bank will use SAS' software in customer and business intelligence, especially in credit card marketing and credit risk assessment.
The contract expands a previous three-year contract in which SAS provided the bank with customer relationship management (CRM) software.
Dawn Kung, managing director of SAS Hong Kong, said the renewed agreement had consolidated new technologies compared with the previous contract in 1999 that was worth about US$1 million.
'They include user computing, marketing and credit risk management on top of our core CRM solutions,' Ms Kung said.
Yeung Yuet-bor, assistant general manager and head of information technology at HSBC, said the bank would develop tools to analyse the repayment patterns of customers, in the light of soaring bad debts and bankruptcies in Hong Kong.
The rate of bad debt, or charge-off ratio, on credit cards reached a record 9.04 per cent for the first three months of this year, with banks writing off an estimated HK$5.45 billion.
