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U.S. bank IT spending is showing some signs of life, with experts predicting a steady, if unspectacular, rise in investment. CIOs of Huntington Bank, Capital One and BB&T reveal what they're buying next year.
January 1
Delivering the perfect marketing pitch via mobile or web at the point of sale is one of the primary upselling goals of mobile banking, one which requires sales pitches and marketing campaigns to be delivered faster, and with more user-appropriate content. For Zuno Bank, which is running a vast bundle of marketing programs — more than 60 in each country in its footprint — matching the right program to the right consumer requires quickly navigating a maze of data and delivering the cross-sell message.
To do this, the bank is turning to a business rules management system that accumulates transactions to quickly update consumer profiles, then matches daily event-based marketing pitches based on those changes in profile.
"We wanted to find a tool that was powerful enough to calculate all campaigns and distribute the campaigns by business line," says Peter Fusek, head of CRM for ZUNO, which is the direct banking arm of Vienna-based Raiffeisen Bank International. "We wanted something flexible enough so the business line users wouldn't have to ask IT for help to use the product." ZUNO, which was launched by Raiffeisen in 2010 to target primarily web and mobile banking consumers.
Each national division has its own set of marketing campaigns, and the institution has licensed a business rules system form FICO called Blaze Advisor to update consumer profiles and match campaigns based the consumer's most recent activities. "We have a daily calculation of all marketing offers, we assess all customers and calculate which campaign to use each day," Fusek says.
The bank hopes to make its marketing more dynamic by executing the campaigns via a business rules engine, which allows the type of campaign to be changed automatically based on direct access to consumer data rather than the prevailing method of using a campaign management platform operating separate from business line platforms. The bank is in effect skipping a step in the marketing process by tying execution directly to the business lines, which allows for faster execution of sales pitches.
The new system extracts transaction information from the institution's data warehouse, which includes transaction and contact history and most recent activity. The business rules management system then matches that information to the proper campaign from the list of 60, based on the bank's rules for life stage, channel and customer segmentation. Overnight batch updates are used to execute the campaigns, which are delivered to consumers via email, SMS or outbound contact center — also based on the bank's business rules. A closed loop feedback system records customer responses to improve future actions and results.
ZUNO also plans to extend the system to client support, product activation, credit scoring and collections. The ultimate goal is to upgrade the speed from overnight to within a minute of the transaction that triggers the marketing pitch. The bank is piloting use of the system that will extract behavior from an online banking interaction and run that through the business rules engine to produce a marketing pitch in "real time," or within a few seconds to a minute after the initial transaction, combined with the feedback option to gauge success and receptiveness.
Fusek says the institution also plans to move the marketing product into social media in the future.
