Growing Bank Trusts SAS® for Business Intelligence

SunTrust Banks Makes More Effective Use of Customer, Product Information with SAS

As one of the nation's largest commercial banking organizations, Atlanta-based SunTrust Banks Inc., has enjoyed 26 consecutive years of growth in operating earnings. And SAS is helping the bank continue that trend by providing it with the capability for deepening its relationships with existing customers and by strengthening internal communications as well.

The bank's marketing systems group uses SAS to analyze account and transactional data to create Web-enabled reports that give more than 5,000 SunTrust employees the information they need to identify customers for direct marketing campaigns, to cross-sell and up-sell products and to fine-tune marketing messages for new products.

Decision makers at SunTrust branches throughout the eastern United States access online marketing reports generated by SAS to better understand customer needs. Advanced search tools and qualified lead lists, for example, provide sales managers with customer and household data, next-product-to-buy models and information about maturing CDs, helping them target sales and marketing campaigns and propose reinvestment strategies to the right customers.

Another transaction-based marketing tool notifies branch employees of any unusual account activity. With this information, sales managers can determine when individual customers may be ready to upgrade to new products or services.

In fact, SunTrust marketing analysts rely on SAS to extract and transform more than 12 million pieces of account and transactional data. The resulting SAS data sets, created specifically for marketing analysis, contain over 16 million records, which are used to produce more than 23,000 reports every week, including line-of-business reports, lead generation lists, direct mailing lists, executive reports and campaign activity reports.

It's a Giant Truckload Sale... At a Bank
One recent marketing campaign at SunTrust Banks offered "something for sale in every department" at each of its 1,100 locations. The marketing systems group used SAS to analyze customer and product data from the month-long campaign, and to provide weekly reports on the success of the promotion.

As the campaign progressed, bank employees checked weekly activity reports on the company intranet. Produced with SAS, these reports showed detailed campaign data for each branch location and each group of products.

"The truckload sale was a huge promotion for us," says Bob May, marketing systems manager. "Our SAS activity reports clearly conveyed the progress of that sale and served as the key resource for people to discover whether or not we were obtaining our goal." In fact, the SAS reports were used to understand and quantify the impact of the different advertising used in each market.

Decision-Making Power Online
In addition to the weekly activity reports for campaign and product activity, the SunTrust marketing systems group also produces relationship management reports, product portfolio reports and dynamic reporting "cubes." These online analytical processing (OLAP) reports provide fast, interactive information to ease synthesis and decision-making.

"Our OLAP reporting is part of a drive within SunTrust Banks to provide information in a more timely manner," says May. "SAS provides business users with the flexibility to form their customized views of a cube on the fly and to save the different views for future use." According to May, users requests for complex reports used to go through a prioritization process and could take as long as two months to complete. "With OLAP, we are able to build the reports at once, and users can define their own dimensions and subsets," he says.

In fact, May says the best thing about SAS is its ease of use. "As long as you know how to use a browser, you can click your way through to the reports. The data is available to you in a point-and-click environment where you're able to get to a lot of different reports and re-order the data in the way you need it. The only training involved is how to use the data, not how to get to the data."

The Future with SAS
As Web-based reporting continues to grow in popularity, May has witnessed an increased confidence in business intelligence, and he looks forward to empowering more and more business users with enhanced intelligence from SAS.

"We get tremendous performance out of our SAS applications, and we're able to satisfy thousands of users with many diverse needs," says May. "SAS will play a large part in our plans as we see those user needs evolve and as we continue to develop our CRM strategy."

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