'Delivering Measurable Value' voted key winning criteria

SAS, the leader in business intelligence, recently announced that its customer, Bankinter, has won the prestigious Gartner European CRM Excellence Award. Bankinter, a leading Spanish retail bank, is using SAS Customer Intelligence solutions to help drive a successful customer relationship management (CRM) strategy company-wide.

"An effective CRM strategy has helped us increase customer profitability, improve the quality of our customer relationships and support Bankinter's key business and strategic goals," said Fernando Morillo, head of CRM, Bankinter. "SAS solutions have helped us create new intelligence about our customers that has driven successful customer initiatives around insight-driven marketing and improved sales effectiveness."

Bankinter's CRM system reaches across its entire organisation, including all its customer segments and bank networks with a multi-channel approach. Bankinter uses SAS to create customer intelligence that is used to identify, segment, and drive a large number of marketing campaigns and offers, while avoiding cross-channel conflicts and optimising customer contacts.

"Bankinter understands the value of customer intelligence and how it can really drive value out of operational CRM systems. Its modern thinking has allowed it to remain extremely competitive in a rapidly consolidating and challenging banking market. We congratulate Bankinter on winning the 2005 Gartner European CRM Excellence Award," said Phil Winters, vice-president of customer intelligence at SAS. "We are proud to be a part of Bankinter's CRM initiatives which have improved its overall customer experience, as well as helped to improve its profitability."