B&N BANK - Polymatica: Big Data Analytics and Powerful Data Science

B&N BANK


B&N BANK

How we helped B&N Bank become more flexible,
delight customers and increase average customer value.


THE OBJECTIVE

B&N Bank specialise in offering credit to the general public; a fiercely competitive market. Consumers have a great deal of choice and new customer offers make building customer loyalty and increasing average customer value difficult.

B&N Bank knew a continuous barrage of irrelevant marketing communications were likely to accelerate customer churn, so wanted to use customer data to improve the relevance of their marketing communications.

“The market is highly competitive. You can’t hassle customers too often with mailings and irrelevant offers, because this will lead to them leaving.” –Yulia Yusufova, Deputy Head of Credit Cards and Salary Projects, B&N Bank.

THE REQUIREMENTS

AUTOMATION

In order to be relevant, B&N Bank’s marketing communications needed to be timely. That meant the bank needed a solution that could not only analyse data quickly but also put results to work in near real-time. B&N Bank wanted customers to receive new product recommendations within one minute of specified triggers.

SCALE

B&N Bank wished to fold socio-demographic data, transactional data, customer portraits and purchase histories into analyses. The amount of data to be analysed surpassed hundreds of millions of rows – and the dimensions necessary for particular analyses fluctuated. B&N Bank needed a powerful tool to keep up.

FLEXIBILITY

B&N Bank’s existing data analysis tools left the digital team rigid and unresponsive. Despite rich datasets, the team were confined to pre-defined reports. Ad-hoc analyses simply weren’t possible – a problem typical for the entire industry. B&N Bank wanted to break away from the pack by unlocking the power of their data.

THE SOLUTION

B&N Bank knew our GPU-accelerated solution could analyse their vast data volumes at speed. As they put it, “there are no other tools that can handle this amount of data.” But was Polymatica the best solution the bank could implement?
Over a period of several months, B&N Bank trialled Polymatica alongside SAS and Python – eventually crowning Polymatica the winning tool.

THE RESULTS



INCREASED FLEXIBILITY

Before Polymatica, B&N Bank were restricted by the same rigid reports. They were simply unable to explore their data with any freedom. Now, the team can run fresh, bespoke analyses daily for newly emerging business tasks.

“Previously, there was no analysis as such – there were pre-defined reports and associated tables. Now there is a possibility to do proper analytics, at the click of a button.”
Yulia Yusufova, Deputy Head of Credit Cards and Salary Projects, B&N Bank.


HAPPY CUSTOMERS

One of B&N Bank’s primary aims was to increase the relevance of marketing communications – both to strengthen commercial relationships and to avoid eliciting ill-feeling amongst a notoriously fickle customer base. By folding Polymatica models into workflows, marketing campaign response rates have already increased by 34%. The figure demonstrates how well the relevant messages were received.

INCREASED CUSTOMER VALUE

Similarly, B&N Bank wished to use what they knew about their customers to introduce them to new products. In line with increased marketing response rates, the bank report new revenues from cross-selling.