Online Loyalty

Recognizing the potential of the Internet, Credit Suisse creates a 360-degree view of customers

Credit Suisse was one of the first banks to recognize the potential of the Internet as a viable new business channel. In October 1995, it became the first Swiss bank to have an Internet presence. With the launch of Direct Net in April 1997, it became the first Swiss bank to offer a full e-business capability. Other "firsts" followed and in mid-1999, with the third release of Direct Net, Credit Suisse integrated personalization and one-to-one functionality into its e-channel business.

This innovation led to rapid growth. In the four years following the initial launch of Direct Net, the number of e-banking contracts increased fivefold. There are now more than 350,000 online customers, a penetration of almost 18 percent, and their business accounts for about 10 percent of the company's transactions. With the explosion in data volumes, Credit Suisse found that the original management information system (MIS), set up in early 1998 to track Direct Net activity, could not keep pace.

"The Direct Net MIS was designed to provide knowledge about client behavior, activities and needs to help improve future offerings through the e-channels and to improve the loyalty and profitability of online clients," says Martin Prestera, manager of e-Channels Switzerland. The MIS focused on contracts, transactions, securities and clients.

This MIS was used to generate about 40 standard reports that were accessible via the company's intranet. In addition, a monthly newsletter was generated and distributed by e-mail. "The system was limited and suffered from a number of weaknesses," says Prestera. Even the standard reports required some manual data manipulation, while ad hoc reports required programming by a central team of analysts.

Rapid change was posing new challenges. The growth in the client base and the number of transactions produced an explosion in data volumes. Meanwhile, the expansion of the online product and service offerings (more functions and new types of transactions) inevitably created new information and reporting requirements the original MIS did not address. The analysts simply could not keep pace with the dramatic increase in requests for ad hoc reports from all over Credit Suisse. The number of information consumers also was expanding rapidly. "Information delivery was becoming increasingly labor-intensive and dependent on the expertise of a small number of employees. We therefore needed to find a solution that would make information access much easier, but also much more secure," says Prestera.

The main requirements for a new MIS were to simplify and automate the extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) of operational data into a data warehouse, and to enable the delivery of standard and dynamically generated reports via a simple Web front end. "The MIS also had to enable decentralized business analysts to formulate and execute their own complex queries, and it had to offer the flexibility to cope with change, for example through enhanced user administration and customization," says Prestera.

SAS built the new MIS to meet these requirements in less than five months from the creation of an initial prototype. It includes roughly 500 standard reports that meet the majority of day-to-day requirements, all of them accessible through a Web browser interface that can be customized for individual business units. Dynamic reports can be generated using a report wizard and displayed in HTML with the output exported in Excel or PDF format, if required.

"For more complex requirements, each business unit has appointed power users who can generate ad hoc reports and produce their own data sets. All that was required was a day's training in SAS Enterprise Guide to get these power users confident in using the system, but the result has been to significantly reduce the demands on the central team of analysts, who can now spend more time doing deep analysis of our customer base," says Prestera.

The solution also includes a subscription channel, enabling authorized users to sign up for regular reports sent by e-mail. Confidentiality and system integrity are assured through user-defined passwords and centralized Web-based administration.

"Importantly, our new MIS gives us the flexibility to meet future needs and the inevitable continued growth of e-business," says Prestera. "It is metadata-based, making it easy to add new codes and integrate new data sources." In short, the MIS gives a 360-degree view of its e-business customers.

Information from the MIS is already being combined with external sources to deliver a complete view of a customer's profile. "The aim now is to extend the e-business MIS to other channels to give an integrated multichannel view of Credit Suisse's customers and to exploit the rich sources of data further with data mining," says Prestera. "Credit Suisse is very impressed at the speed with which this solution has been built, and the power and flexibility of SAS."

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