Fortis is an international financial services provider engaged in banking and insurance. The company offers personal, business, and institutional customers a comprehensive package of products and services through its own channels, in collaboration with intermediaries and through other distribution partners.
Building on its leading position in the Benelux countries, Fortis offers an integrated network to internationally operating companies throughout Europe. It provides wealthy private clients and business people with advanced services based on a unique set of competencies. Fortis also successfully combines its banking and insurance expertise in growth markets in Europe and Asia, and leads the bancassurance markets in Spain and Portugal.
With a market capitalization of €31 billion, Fortis ranks among the 20 largest financial institutions in Europe. Its solvent position, presence in 44 countries, and dedicated, professional workforce of 56,000 provides a combination of global strength and local flexibility—offering its clients optimum support.
In line with its strategy to combine banking and insurance expertise in growth markets in Europe and Asia, Fortis acquired Disbank, Turkey's seventh largest privately owned bank, on July 4, 2005. After a considerable re-branding effort, Fortis Turkey launched on November 28, 2005.
Fortis tasked its retail customer relationship management (CRM) team to prepare Fortis Turkey for the launch campaign, aiming to take advantage of the many leads the bank anticipated. To be successful, Fortis Turkey needed to be able to offer the "next best product" to each customer through its branches, Internet banking, and Contact Center channels. Aside from being a challenging task, this was complicated by a strict time limit due to many parallel projects.
The CRM team prepared a multi-faced project plan, creating a campaign called "Fortis Has an Offer for You." For the core analytical work, Fortis turned to PASW Modeler. The company used PASW Modeler's segmentation and best basket modeling capabilities to analyze existing data from a robust marketing data warehouse.
Fortis upgraded the existing campaign management tool, which was developed in-house, so that the company could make offers through inbound customer contacts regardless of touchpoint. Fortis also designed an online process that provided daily evaluations and updates, ensuring all channels interact together to avoid overlaps.
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With the acquisition of Disbank, Fortis began re-branding studies immediately. The corporate communications department prepared a large kick-off campaign to introduce the Fortis brand to the Turkish market. The bank anticipated that such a campaign would attract a lot of attention, creating many sales opportunities.
Previously, the Disbank CRM team had successfully prepared propensity-based sales campaigns. For some products, the acceptance rate was up to 90 percent. With the acquisition, however, the new Fortis Turkey needed to be able to offer the "next best product" to every available customer.
This meant Fortis Turkey had to predict the "next best product" for more than 1,700,000 customers—and be able to update the offers in short periods of time.
It's always been challenging to use customer-oriented contacts as sales opportunities. It's even harder to convert a lead obtained from a communications effort such as mass advertising. Therefore, banks must take advantage of every sales opportunity in today's competitive market.
Customer sales representatives with a small customer portfolio may know each of their customers by name and be able to select a suitable product or service to offer their customers. These days, however, most representatives have portfolios with thousands of customers. The sales representative doesn't have time to assess an individual customer's needs. Offers are far from customized, and might likely be the first product or service on a list showing what the customer does not already have. To help representatives make the right offer to the right customer, centralized, multi-channel CRM capabilities are essential.
The project plan for "Fortis Has an Offer for You" incorporated both analytical tasks and operational CRM capabilities. This enabled Fortis to deliver offers during inbound customer contacts through multiple channels.
PASW Modeler provided the basis for this project. The retail CRM team used this software for:
Each task mentioned above could be a separate project requiring a considerable amount of time to accomplish. Fortis found that PASW Modeler's "completeness of vision," which is sometimes overlooked by professionals concentrating only on analytical capabilities, proved to be strong.
Fortis completed all of the tasks in less than two-and-a-half months. Each customer offer was ready to be presented in all three channels on the day "Disbank" became "Fortis" on November 28.
Today, the bank's offers are updated daily through PASW Modeler. Within two months, Fortis made 91,603 offers to 61,442 customers who contacted the bank through the three channels. In the first month alone, the bank averaged a 16 percent acceptance rate of offers for 16 different products.
In a project like this one, analytical capabilities are a must. The bank relied on algorithms such as K-means, TwoStep, Kohonen networks, Apriori, and GRI. PASW Modeler provided not only these analytical capabilities, but was easy to use and offered a completeness of vision that no other product could match.
Kadir Karakurum, CRM manager of Fortis Turkey, said, "It would have been possible to obtain the analytical models from other vendors and complete the analysis, but it would not be feasible to deploy or maintain a project such as ours without PASW Modeler's straight-forward stream structure."
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