You Can Take It to the Bank

by Tom Gibbs

SAS and Intel provide Solution Blueprints to improve strategic decision making, operational efficiency and overall customer service for retail banking.

Within any industry, access to reliable data across an enterprise means valuable intelligence for strategic decision making. When it comes to retail banking, competition to attract and keep customers is fierce. Deregulation of the banking industry has lowered competitive entry barriers and competition is coming from both within and outside the industry.

Technological advancements and the growth of the Internet have lowered geographic barriers and brought information to customers' fingertips. Changing life-styles, technological sophistication and a myriad of banks and banking options to choose from have heightened customers' expectations and lowered their loyalty. Furthermore, transactions have become commoditized; differentiation is now achieved through appropriate and consistent services delivery of relevant and timely information. To survive and succeed, banks are looking for ways to increase customer satisfaction and retention – while containing costs, improving efficiency and maximizing return on their technology investments. To accomplish these measures, banks must know their customers, providing them new, convenient, relevant services and products at the point of contact so action can be taken.

To meet these challenges, Intel vertical industry experts have teamed with SAS and leading system integrators to develop Solution Blueprints for advanced Intel architectures. These pre-configured, tested and customizable solutions ease implementation and speed time to market.

The SAS Banking Intelligence Solutions help large retail banks effectively implement business strategies, operate more efficiently, serve customers better and execute successful marketing campaigns. These solutions bring together leading-edge technology, predefined analytical and dimensional models, as well as campaign planning management and architecture. The resulting end-to-end intelligence infrastructure provides reliable enterprisewide data to support strategic business decision making. And by taking advantage of Intel architecture's support for open standards, technological innovation, and strong volume, price and performance value, this scalable solution allows banks to quickly and easily add solution components.

This solution helps banks achieve higher cost efficiencies, improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, and boost return on investment (ROI). Using predefined analytics and financial industry-specific models, the solution lets banks achieve faster implementation, reduced system complexity and faster ROI. Banks are given a dependable, accurate, enterprisewide view – allowing them to turn their raw data into structured information for analysis and decision making. The following components combine to provide the end-to-end intelligence infrastructure:

SAS Strategic Performance Management for Banking: translates business strategy into measurable actions that can be monitored through-out the organization.

SAS Marketing Automation for Banking: integrates software with a pre-defined data environment to combine marketing analytics and campaign management.

SAS Customer Retention for Banking: enables banks to identify those customers with the highest propensity to take their business elsewhere, as well as the key factors influencing their decisions.

SAS Credit Scoring for Banking: helps banks reduce costs by identifying existing and potential customers' credit worthiness.

Scalable Intel® architecture based-servers: provides banks with strong volume, price and performance value to achieve goals – without increasing costs.

The SAS Banking Intelligence Solutions provide banks with valuable business intelligence in the form of integrated data within a cost-effective, scalable infrastructure. The reliability, availability, flexibility and manageability of servers powered by the Intel Xeon processor family gives large retail banks a scalable way to make the most out of their existing data and technology.

The SAS Banking Intelligence Solutions is one of several Solutions Blueprints that SAS and Intel have developed together to help organizations make the best use of their business intelligence data.