Bank's conversion rates jump to 30 percent

Portugal's Banco Santander Totta gets to know its customers even better with SAS^®

In the banking world, the challenge of getting to know customers has grown increasingly difficult as ATMs and online services replace traditional face-to-face transactions in branch offices. And for larger banks, such as Portugal's Banco Santander Totta, the volume of customers and transactions compounds the problem.

But with SAS Customer Intelligence, Santander Totta is able to divine the needs and wants of its 1.7 million customers. "By using SAS to segment our customers in credit card campaigns, we've seen conversion rates increase from 4 or 5 percent to 20 or 30 percent," says Sergio Vieira, Santander Totta's director of customer relationship management (CRM). "We're increasing the success of our campaigns by five or six times."

Knowing when to make the right offer
Santander Totta has 640 branches throughout Portugal. The bank began its CRM project in 2001 by collecting historical data to learn everything about its customers, including their purchasing behavior and economic means, Vieira says. For example, the bank could identify couples who were suddenly purchasing clothes from baby stores and determine that they must be expecting a child.

"So we can make them loan offers to buy a new house or a new car," Vieira says. "We can predict that, because if you're going to have a child, you'll want a bigger car."

With SAS, Santander Totta builds churn models, cross-selling and up-selling models, next-best-offer models, and attrition models. And the bank has confidence in the models, which is especially important in a country where customers tend to change banks often.

"We know that the results of a study or model with SAS are the truth, so we can make better decisions and make the right decisions at the right time," Vieira says. "We are assured that SAS will predict churn, and we can reduce churn by taking action with our customers. In our tests, we were able to reduce churn by 20 to 25 percent with SAS."

Gaining competitive edge
The strength of SAS, combined with the know-how of Vieira's staff, allows Santander Totta to make the right decision at the right time, which ultimately reduces costs and enhances profits, he says. And that's where the bank gains competitive advantage, Vieira adds.

"By using SAS and all the models we built and implemented, we are able to contact the customer when the customer wants us to make contact," Vieira says. "That's the difference between banking in the present days and banking in the future."

Santander Totta chose SAS after comparing it with other data mining vendors. "We chose SAS because it's the better tool in data mining – it's a tool that gives us confidence to make the models and to start a project that management believes in," Vieira says. "If you buy a SAS product, you know that in 10 years the company will give you the service you want. It is a relationship – not just a buy-and-sell relationship; it is a relationship with persons."

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