National City Banks On TransUnion Cross-Selling System

National City Corp. has implemented business-analytics software from TransUnion LLC to boost its credit-card business through targeted cross selling. The system correlates data on a customer's credit report with National City's risk criteria, enabling the bank to extend offers through its Web site, branches, and call centers.

At $2.5 billion in receivables and 1.1 million active accounts, National City's card business is small by big-bank standards--Bank of America will have $143 billion in receivables and 40 million active accounts following the completion of its acquisition of MBNA Corp.

Yet the bank has set high expectations for its cross-selling initiative. Since its launch in February, the effort has yielded noticeable improvements in cross-selling effectiveness, says Bill Bostwick, National City's senior VP of bankcard operations.

The defining feature of the TransUnion system is its scalability, says Dan Smith, TransUnion's VP of strategic accounts. "It's not an out-of-the-box solution but one that's highly customizable to any size bank," he says. The system works with user-defined criteria such as estimated income, debt-to-income ratios, revenue projection, and home market value to provide predictive intelligence for making credit decisions.

In the case of National City, the biggest technical challenge was linking the bank's business rules with the TransUnion platform. "It entailed taking all their business logic and adapting it to our system," Smith says. The process took about five months.

The long-term benefit for National City, Smith says, "is the ability to alter its business rules without making changes to the system."