AUGUST 2, 2006
see http://www.gobiltmore.com/Getty.html
As many as 40% of community banks are now using some kind of customer relationship management (CRM) system or service, says Steve Williams, principal of Cornerstone Advisors, a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based consultancy. Providers such as Brookfield, Wisc.-based Fiserv Inc., Chicago-based The Biltmore Group Inc.and Open Solutions Inc. of Glastonbury, Conn. have all offered application services provider (ASP)-based services that make it easier for a small bank with limited financial and staff resources to mount a worthwhile CRM effort, he says.
Williams says these CRM systems typically don’t offer as much complexity and sophistication as customized in-house systems or offerings from software giants such as SAP AG or Oracle Corp.. But just being able to leverage customer data in a user-friendly way is usually sufficient for most small institutions, he adds.
Fiserv, where half of the core processing clients utilize CRM products, recently introduced a product to make CRM even more accessible to community banks. Its “Report Wizard” will enable a wider range of bank personnel to easily access and analyze customer data, according to Mike Rigney, president of Fiserv’s VISION business unit.
VISION has been offering CRM services to smaller financial institutions through an application services provider (ASP) model since 2002, Rigney says.
“These tools are becoming far more accessible for community banks,” says Kathleen Khirallah, research director of retail banking for Needham, Mass.-based TowerGroup Inc.. “The idea of offering business intelligence tools like this through an ASP model simplifies it for community banks.”
These smaller CRM systems may also be used within departments or specialized areas within a larger institution. The Biltmore Group Inc.'s Getty CRM, for instance, is used in the Wealth Management areas of ABN AMRO's North America holdings, LaSalle Bank and Standard Federal.
Rigney says most CRM systems force banks to rely on a few select IT staff with the skill to access and manipulate the data, which favors large banks with sophisticated IT capabilities. The Wizard’s graphical user interface, by contrast, allows even the “novice user” to select, import and manipulate data from the bank’s customer relationship database in order to produce reports, charts and “pivots,” he says.
Pivots are tables that enable the user to look at the same pool of data along different parameters – for example, viewing a customer group based on the average dollar amount of their assets, and then looking at them by number of accounts, Rigney explains.
Fiserv’s customers first began piloting the Wizard, a Unix-based graphical user interface software program, about three months ago. Since then, about 130 VISION customers have adopted the product, Rigney says.
One of those customers is of Liberty, Mo. Liberty Savings Bank F.S.B.. Aubury Adair, business systems manager, says the $258 million-asset thrift had been using Fiserv VISION’s CRM system for about three years before adding Wizard.
Adair says Wizard has made the system’s full information capabilities much more accessible to users in the bank’s six branches. Personal bankers, branch managers and even tellers can run reports to discern which customers have delinquent loans, or might be good targets for a home equity offers, he says. “It makes it so the people who aren’t IT-savvy can use it.”
The Report Wizard was bundled in with the rest of the bank’s CRM and core processing services, says Adair, who would not disclose what the bank pays for the product. But he adds that in the few months his bank has been using the Wizard, it has helped Liberty Savings mitigate information bottlenecks and more quickly mount a campaign to offer home equity loans.
Rigney would not share the pricing on Fiserv’s Wizard in specific or VISION services in general, but Williams estimates a bank will typically pay about $5,000 to $15,000 per month for CRM services as part of an overall core processing package.
