Retail banks turning to customer intelligence systems

The deployment of customer intelligence systems will increase rapidly in the retail banking sector over the next four years as organisations attempt to exploit the information held in their CRM systems more effectively.

Market research company Ovum expects spending by retail banks on multichannel integration and customer information systems to grow at a compound annual rate of 4.6% between 2009 and 2014. As a result, the value of the market will jump from $4.9 billion last year to $6.1 billion in four years time.

At the moment, most retail banks employ multiple, overlapping systems that provide only fragmented information about customers. Therefore, the key driver behind such expenditure will be to gain a more complete understanding of such clients by integrating the transaction-based information currently held in their CRM systems with web analytics and marketing data in order to analyse and interpret it more effectively.

Jaroslaw Knapik, a senior analyst at Ovum said: "Banks should be confident that customer data is complete, accurate and up-to-date. Getting there requires banks to treat customer data as a strategic asset that is managed as a shared resource."

The ultimate goal is to enhance the organisation’s ability to target the ‘right’ customers and provide them with a more integrated experience. Such systems should also enable retail banks to cross- and up-sell to such clients more effectively without adopting an obvious ‘hard-sell’ approach and to improve customer service.

"All these improvements aim at greater customer understanding, which will ultimately translate into improved trust and maximised profits," Knapik said.