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INDUSTRY INSIGHTS Q&A with Dan Schatt		Commerce Intelligence Solution Identifies High-Potential Candidates for Online Bill Pay and Other Banking Services MasterCard Solution Builds Rich Portrait of Your Portfolio Based on Observed Purchase Behavior MasterCard RPPS offers a highly effective marketing program that can help your institution raise online bill payment adoption and usage levels (see related article). Now, MasterCard Advisors, the largest global consultancy focused on the payments area, can help you identify—with remarkable accuracy—the customers most likely to respond to your marketing communications and choose to pay their bills online. "By working with MasterCard RPPS, our customers now have access to a unique proprietary solution that can help you to improve the targeting of your online bill payment adoption campaigns while dramatically reducing customer acquisition costs," says Ed McLaughlin, group head, MasterCard RPPS. "What's more, Commerce Intelligence allows you to target the perfect candidates in your customer base for virtually any product or service you offer." A sophisticated technique Leveraging internal spend data for your customer base, along with external data previously unavailable to your organization, the Commerce Intelligence solution delivers actionable insights that can help maximize your cross-sell, up-sell, retention, activation, and other opportunities across your entire portfolio, according to Jim Thomas, global solution leader, Commerce Intelligence, MasterCard Advisors. The solution uses a proprietary technique that analyzes observed, detailed customer spend behavior from a variety of sources—among them, the financial institution and MasterCard. The spend data might include DDA account activity, credit and debit card spend, and other activity. One especially valuable source of data is the MasterCard data warehouse. "It's a rich resource that's unique in the payments industry," says Thomas. The warehouse archives transaction data from millions of accounts, and it grows by millions of transactions a day. "The Commerce Intelligence solution enables us to create a 360-degree view of customers as consumers—attitudes, preferences, where they shop, what their wallets look like, and so on," says Thomas. "With this information, we can help an institution understand the precise composition of its portfolio." The identity of individuals is known only by the financial institution, preserving consumer and institutional privacy. "The solution is specifically designed to provide absolute consumer privacy and data protection. No personally identifiable information is provided to MasterCard Advisors," says Thomas. Customizable Purchase Clusters Commerce Intelligence breaks out the portfolio into Purchase ClustersTM, which are actionable psychodemographic profiles. Thirty-one of these unique, leading-edge archetypes have been created, and they can be customized for an institution's specific needs. "These profiles offer clear indications of customer propensity for specific products and services," says Thomas. For example, if a customer in the "online active" cluster is paying for broadband and actively shopping online but has not signed up for online bill pay yet, he or she would be a perfect candidate for that service. If someone falls into the "about to be married/newlywed" cluster, he or she would make an excellent prospect for a mortgage offer. "We have a lot of wrenches in our tool kit," says Thomas. "Segmentation offers one approach, but we can also deploy a 'pure propensity' model. For example, if a bank wants to identify all customers with a high likelihood of using its online bill payment service, we can create a customized predictive model that will do exactly that." Remarkable results Another "wrench" developed by Commerce Intelligence is the Commerce Coalition initiative, which brings together parties with mutual objectives. A recent Commerce Coalition campaign, for example, aligned complementary merchants from four business sectors with a major card issuer. In a population of several million cardholders, this project identified a target group that had a high proportion of individuals in three specified Purchase Clusters. "This effort generated lifts in spending as high as 14%, demonstrating that target cardholder behaviors can be motivated based on loyalty segmentation and differentiated offers," says Thomas. A Commerce Coalition campaign could be leveraged to get paper checks out of the system and move consumers to online bill payment, McLaughlin notes. A major utility, for example, might collaborate with several banks to identify customers who are paying their utility bill by check. "Both the utility and the banks could then target these individuals with a focused copromotional effort that leverages the insights provided by Commerce Intelligence," says McLaughlin. "Working together in this way not only allows these organizations to share the funding, but it gives their effort a heightened credibility and impact. They might even enhance the proposition by offering to automatically enroll these customers in their bank's online bill payment service and immediately set them up to make payments to the utility." Better business partner "We believe Commerce Intelligence can help you get maximum value out of your marketing dollars for online adoption by providing more precise targeting for your communications," says McLaughlin. "That can translate to increased campaign yield and reduced acquisition costs. Commerce Coalitions can help get more checks out of your system and move customers to your online bill payment service. "We're happy to be able to alert MasterCard RPPS customers about this powerful new tool," he adds. "It's another way we're working to be a better business partner." For more information on the Commerce Intelligence solution, contact Jim Thomas, MasterCard Advisors, at 914-249-5748 or jim_thomas@mastercard.com. Printer Friendly Version Back to Top