Fast-growing bank wins market share with cloud solution

ICA Banken cut marketing campaign design from six weeks to one day and increased conversions tenfold

When a company has hundreds of thousands of customers, it might be a daunting task to effectively connect each person with a relevant offer. But that’s precisely what a modern, savvy business must do to be successful and retain clients. Linus Axelsson, CRM manager at ICA Banken, knows that every touch point throughout the customer journey is an opportunity to engage with customers and tailor services to their unique needs.

“We have more than 750,000 customers, but no branches, so we meet our customers mainly digitally,” says Axelsson. “Our goal is to give our customers a personal experience, even in digital channels. By being personal and relevant, we can entice our customers to use more of our services, giving us the opportunity to offer just the right thing to the right person, whether they visit us through our mobile app, by phone or through the website.”

ICA Banken is part of the same group as ICA, Sweden's largest supermarket chain. The ICA card is used by more than 2.5 million individuals, and for many customers, it is the link between ICA Banken and the store in which they shop for groceries.

“Our customers often visit us through our digital channels to perform different banking services, such as making payments, checking their balances, renewing cards, etc.,” says Axelsson. “We are a full-range bank. Our challenge is to show customers relevant offers when they use the app or our website – offers that are so good, they’ll start using more of our services.”

Reading customers’ digital behavior

ICA Banken is a full-service bank with mortgage loans, savings and other services that all the major competitors have. In addition, the company offers insurance for pets, houses and cars.

“We obviously want our customers to use all of our products that are relevant to them and that are profitable for us,” says Axelsson. “That's why it is so important to read the customer's digital behavior, while matching it with the information we have about them as customers in the bank. But for reasons of privacy and security, it is important to handle all information with extreme caution.”

To get a unified view of its customers and create personalized offers, ICA Banken relies on SAS^® Customer Intelligence 360. The bank’s digital data, such as the user's path to the bank and his or her navigation and other behavior on the app or website, is collected in real time. Bank data, on the other hand, is in a data warehouse. This data is combined with a pseudonymized customer key in a cloud solution. Together, these data sources create rich opportunities to customize the information displayed.

“We harvest digital behavior,” says Axelsson. “For example, we can see when a customer looks for more information on mortgages. We can then decide to show a customized offer for mortgages, depending on his or her economy and history the next time the person visits the bank. Or we may choose not to show an offer for mortgages, if the analysis indicates that the customer in question can’t handle more loans than he or she already has.”

Efficient conversion rates

The results are impressive. After launching its first marketing campaign using SAS, ICA Banken saw conversion rates improve tenfold.

“We have increased our efficiency several times over since we got our systems and processes in place,” says Axelsson. “Designing a marketing campaign, which previously took three people six weeks to produce, now is handled by two people in just one day. And we aim to do it in a few hours.”

Axelsson also points out the benefits of failing quickly. “In the past, we could spend weeks developing campaigns that, for various reasons, did not work. Now we can test, reject, redo and try again – it's fast and gives a huge boost of both productivity and conversion. Another advantage of working with the absolute best technology is that it is easy to recruit talented analysts and campaign resources.”