Bank Systems & Technology is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Data & Analytics

00:08 AM
Connect Directly
RSS
E-Mail
50%
50%

Security National Brings Families Closer

In some places, "family values" isn't just an election-year catchphrase.

In some places, "family values" isn't just an election-year catchphrase. Indeed, the most profitable customer relationship at Security National Bank (Laurel, Neb.; $98 million in assets) is a father-and-son team. The bank discovered this by using customer profitability software from IPS-Sendero, a unit of Fiserv (Brookfield, Wis.), which it deployed at the start of 2003.

Before installing the software, the bank had seen the father-son relationship as five disconnected entities. "There was a corporation, a partnership, a couple of individuals and then a separate farming operation," says Keith Knudsen, EVP at Security National Bank. "With this customer profitability system, we're able to link those relationships together."

Bank executives have started to use that type of profitability information to craft pricing strategies. Also, the bank has linked its IPS-Sendero data to its teller and platform software from Information Technology Inc. (ITI, also a Fiserv business), so that profitability information can be made available to employees in the front office as well.

As a result, the fact that both father and son are extremely profitable to the bank can be discovered by employees as they work. "We've taken the data and have been able to move it to the front-end, to our tellers and the bookkeepers," says Knudsen. "If one of those top 10 percent customers comes in, and they're complaining about a fee that they were charged, the teller doesn't have to go through a process. They can waive it and say, 'We really appreciate your business. I'll take care of that.'"

"The idea is to provide good service to everybody, and step it up for these top 10 percent," adds Knudsen.

But even though such an initiative allows the bank to gain strategic clarity about the drivers of its overall profitability, it's difficult to pin down an exact return on investment for the technology involved. "It's really hard to do," admits Knudsen. "We know what the system cost, we know that there's quite a bit of time and effort tied into getting a system like that set up and done right, but the best way we're going to be able to measure results is over time."

---

Wescom Credit Union (Pasadena) - Collecting and disseminating customer satisfaction data across the firm, for benchmarking and immediate follow-up.

Scotiabank (Toronto) - Driving compensation and sales approaches using an integrated view of its business customers.

Pacific Capital Bancorp (Santa Barbara) - Making data available anywhere it's needed in the firm with minimal effort, using a data virtualization layer.

First Fidelity Bank (Oklahoma City) - Improving customer service in a multi-branch network using cross-channel, integrated CRM.

Northstar Financial (Bad Axe, Mich.) - Building a de novo bank network from the ground up, based on customer-centricity.

Comment  | 
Print  | 
More Insights
Register for Bank Systems & Technology Newsletters
Slideshows
Video
Bank Systems & Technology Radio
Archived Audio Interviews
Join Bank Systems & Technology Associate Editor Bryan Yurcan, and guests Karen Massey and Jerry Silva from IDC Financial Insights, for a conversation about the firm's 11th annual FinTech rankings.