Sparkasse Zollernalb

Sparkasse Zollernalb operates as a public-law credit institution owned by the Zollernalb district, affiliated with the German Savings Banks and Giro Association, and functions as the market leader in its region. It maintains 50 branches and self-service locations with 699 employees. As part of the Sparkasse-Finanz group it offers universal banking services including building savings contracts, investment funds, insurance products and leasing arrangements through partner organisations.

This is sales work rather than compliance work. The mechanism is the same predictive analytics platform the compliance modules run on, applied to a question about the bank's own customers.

The bank defined credit-card sales objectives focused on converting standard cardholders to premium gold-card customers. Rather than addressing all standard cardholders with a high waste rate, management wanted only the customers with real upgrade potential. Anonymous data covering master records, payment transaction data, turnover data and portfolio details for 12,500 standard credit-card holders was provided as the basis for the scoring model.

Using DetectX®, the attributes of all data sets were weighted in model calculations to derive patterns relating to purchasing behaviour and the probability of a transaction. Once the relevant patterns had been identified, the customer data was scored against them and divided into potential classes, surfacing the cardholders with the highest upgrade potential. In August the targeted cardholders received a direct-mail offer. The tool also takes the results of campaigns already run into account, so its analysis improves with each one.

Almost 20 percent of the customers identified in the scoring process opted for the gold card within six weeks, against historical success rates of between 2 and 4 percent in comparable campaigns run without DetectX®. The campaign brought a double cost reduction, through careful use of sales resources and through smaller campaign volumes, and the targeted approach with tailored offers led to greater customer satisfaction. The bank subsequently applied the same method to investment products, pension offerings and lending, and reports over 70 percent accuracy in identifying customers at risk of churn.