FirstRand Bank successfully implements SAS Campaign Manager

First National Bank, the retail banking arm of FirstRand Bank, has successfully implemented SAS Campaign Manager. This was part of the SAS Enterprise Marketing Automation solution from SAS Institute, leader in business intelligence.

Having subsidiaries listed on both the JSE Securities Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange, FirstRand Bank is one of SA's "Big Four" banks, with over 700 branches nationwide, approximately five million customers and nearly 30 000 employees.

"SA's big four banks are very commodotised, all striving for a customer-centric approach to service," says Jithendra Daya, Chief Knowledge Officer of the Analytics and Data Division within First National Bank. "One of the competitive advantage lies in ensuring customers remain loyal to your organisation for longer, by understanding and fulfilling their needs on all levels."

"We established our marketing mart by leveraging SAS products, namely: Warehouse Administrator and Base SAS (PC, Mainframe), and are in the process of entrenching E-Miner," says Stuart Maciver, Marketing Manager, Knowledge-Based Marketing at FirstRand Bank.

Daya and Maciver were addressing delegates at SAS's annual user group conference - seugi21 - held in Vienna, Austria recently.

FirstRand Bank recognised that it could better market its products and services to its customers, by consolidating all Direct Marketing campaigns, automating its measurement process, establishing new revenue streams and initiating and integrating strategic communications at a customer level.

"We have already utilised SAS's toolsets to enable us in our analysis of our database information. We used these tools to develop predictive models and to do various behavioural analysis of our database," adds Daya.

Says Maciver: "We have started using SAS Enterprise Marketing Automation (EMA), allowing us to formulate direct marketing campaigns which were exactly targeted to our new segmented customer groups at a group level.

"We intend to, by the push of a button, quickly action strategies by mapping campaigns and particular products directly onto targeted customer groups by using the SAS EMA solution."

According to Maciver, in addition to a notable increase in responses to campaigns, the bank realised it was able to reduce campaign turnaround and results delivery times, and increase the volume and spread of campaigns across various audiences.

"We intend to reduced campaign turnaround time to just four days, and, from our first three direct marketing campaigns run during the pilot phase of the project, we achieved a good return on investment, on those campaigns," Daya said.

Daya added that the future of EMA within the retail bank was bright - the knowledge management team hoped to take the toolset into the wider group, outside of the retail bank.

"We want to test and try multi-channel and multi-faceted campaigns, eventually incorporating our ATMs for dynamic marketing opportunities," added Daya.

"Within our business, we acknowledge the role of technology in automating our fulfilment of FirstRand's business strategy and process, by enhancing our data and helping us to understand and service our customers better," Daya concluded.