Market suitable services - Company Operations

Communications News, July, 2000 by Sean Kelly

Marshall & Ilsley (M&I), a $24.9 billion Milwaukee financial institution, needed to identify the right customers for appropriate promotions in order to find the most effective use of its marketing dollars. For example, a customer who opens a $50,000 home equity line but never uses it is a less profitable customer than one that uses a significantly lower line of credit.

Transforming raw customer data into easily understood, predictive models of customer behavior is a difficult task when thousands of different customers are serviced by many branch offices. M&I had difficulty with other solutions that were slow--it was unable to handle its large databases to produce accurate customer models.

"We deal with an extremely large database, with more than 2.2 million accounts and 700,000 households," says Clarence Massardt, VP of database marketing and statistical analysis at M&R.

M&I turned to Quadstone and its Decisionhouse software to direct and improve targeting its marketing campaigns. "Unlike other systems we tried, Quadstone is able to process the information and build a model in only an afternoon," says Masshardt. "It is this time saving that has been the biggest benefit to us. My analysts can now get done in a day or two what used to take weeks. Productivity and efficiency have improved dramatically."

Decisionhouse allows M&I the opportunity to directly promote products to those customers who are most likely to be interested. By providing a comprehensive view of customer data and quick analysis, Decisionhouse delivered more targeted marketing campaigns, yielding M&I's highest ROI to date.

www.quadstone.com Circle 253 for more information from Quadstone