Winner: Citibank Hong Kong
Project: Real-time marketing
The ability to understand and quickly respond to customer banking behaviour forms a critical part of any bank's cross-sell proposition. Typically, however, customer relationship marketing platforms operate according to incomplete, incorrect or out-of-date information, impairing the organisation's capacity to provide relevant product or service offers at the opportune moment. Citibank's Hong Kong retail business has developed a real-time marketing and customer acquisition engine, called the Centralised Offer Palette System (COPS), to address this problem head-on.
By integrating and synchronising all inbound and outbound channels, the platform provides the bank with a single and complete view of each customer's accounts and activities, allowing the bank to assess the timing and relevancy of marketing offers. Unusually, COPS is able to instantaneously consider a number of customer events, including banking events, such as credit card purchases or ATM transactions, and life events, such as customer birthdays or overseas travel, when determining the bank's response. The system deploys complex event processing technology to evaluate static and dynamic events against a customer profile and 'propensity model', to determine in real time the next best offer the bank can extend to the customer.
Gigi Chan, director of decision management, Citibank Global Consumer Group, Hong Kong, says: "With the COPS going live, real-time data can be used to analyse customer behaviours and so we can answer customer needs immediately. Traditional marketing that uses historical data will likely die out in future."
By reacting in real or near-real time through the use of mechanisms such as SMS messaging, the bank is able to capitalise on opportunities to cross-sell products and services, increase activity in existing channels and products, and extend loyalty rewards, while they are still relevant. Because the system operates on a 'rules basis', it can be adapted by business users to design the rules that govern a particular campaign without the involvement of IT staff. The bank is also using the intelligence in the system for fraud prevention and proactive customer service.
The judges were impressed with the real-time capacity of the system and the unique ability to immediately target customer needs. Maggie Yung, country marketing director, Citi Hong Kong, says: "We are honoured that our COPS has been recognised by The Banker to be its Chair's Choice."
Maggie Yung, country marketing director, Citi Hong Kong
