ICICI's Business Intelligence Group realized that before the bank could get a clear picture of each of its customers and begin to tailor its products and services accordingly, it would have to consolidate its data from eight disparate systems into one data warehouse. In 1999, the company turned to Teradata.

Initial investment
ICICI considered various data warehousing and CRM solutions. Some solutions providers operated only in India, while others offered solutions around the world. As a global leader with financial services expertise and a system that can handle large data volumes, Teradata emerged as the foremost solution for a multi-phase implementation.

According to Anup Bagchi, ICICI's deputy general manager, "Teradata was chosen because of its proven leadership in the data warehousing space and more so due to the successes in the financial services vertical. Their ability to bring global best practices to the table coupled with a strong focus in the region [helped us make our decision]."

Initially, ICICI expressed concern about being the first Teradata India installation. The company was also the first major local bank implementing a CRM solution. "Teradata overcame some of these concerns by giving the ICICI core team adequate training in the space and by sharing their globally accepted templates to help in analysis and evaluation," Bagchi says. "They also brought in consultants with several years of experience in global markets to guide the project. Through the duration of the project, Teradata has also shown a willingness to help in ensuring that business value will be realized out of the warehouse."

Besides being India's first installation, ICICI's desire to quickly build the warehouse's foundation (Phase I) also presented a challenge. Teradata tackled the project with a seven-member team. Calling on its global resources, Teradata asked a project manager from Australia to work with six local developers to meet this challenge so that ICICI did not have to devote any dedicated resources during the project's initial stages.

ICICI also faced data issues in creating customer snapshots. Harshal Dalal of ICICI's Business Intelligence Group notes, "Correctness and completeness of data are among the biggest challenges faced in developing economies."

Consolidated assets
ICICI's Teradata Warehouse integrates data from multiple sources, including Oracle and flat files. The system provides users with information about each customer's checking accounts, fixed deposits, credit cards and other financial information. The warehouse uses data on customer balances and ATM transactions to measure each customer's channel usage.

Through Behavior Explorer and views, users develop customer profiles and run ad hoc queries on more than 200 gigabytes of data. Analysts then use the information to guide product development and marketing campaigns. The resulting products stem from unified customer wants and needs. Campaigns address each individual's total requirements, instead of just pushing distinct products.

Running on a Teradata WorldMark 4400 machine, the initial implementation allowed ICICI to analyze its customer database, which includes information from eight separate operational systems:

The successful Phase I implementation, completed at the end of 2000, led to an immediate Phase II expansion. At that time, ICICI dedicated four core team members to the warehouse's development. Two members represented the bank's Business Intelligence Unit, and two worked in the Information Technology department. Interfacing with ICICI's four employees were six Teradata associates: one project manager, one business analyst, a technical lead and three technical consultants.

Phase II put reporting and analytical tools to work. The analytical tools include Behavior Explorer's Transaction View and Product View. The tools feature standard and interactive reports, drill-down capabilities, cross-sell opportunities, channel usage by segment and more. To facilitate data access, Phase II deployed Cognos PowerCubes. The team completed this part of the project in eight months, and users began deriving reports and retrieving data in August 2001.

Diversified portfolio
"Teradata has helped ICICI understand the behavioral and financial profiles of our customers," Bagchi says. "ICICI has leveraged this understanding to effectively target specific customer segments with relevant offers and communication."

With these customer profiles, ICICI is able to tailor its marketing campaigns to meet the needs of its target prospects. "A recent example is a national campaign that was run for the bank's priority banking product," Bagchi says. "We used the intelligence gained from an analysis of the characteristics and needs of existing high net worth customers in order to design the campaign to acquire new priority banking customers."

Besides boosting customer acquisition rates, ICICI uses the data warehouse to increase business from current customers. Dalal says, "ICICI Bank has run over 40 cross-sell, up-sell and retention campaigns out of the Teradata warehouse in the past year. The credit cards attribute approximately 18% to 20% of their business in the past year to the cross-sell campaigns run out of the warehouse."

Much of this success is due to ICICI's newfound ability to put the right product in front of the right customer at the right time. "The Teradata solution has allowed the bank to re-engineer product offerings based on customer needs," Bagchi explains. "The bank can now have a single view of the customer and household across products and channels. This has been a significant win considering that the key challenge has been to resolve disparate relationships across multiple products. It now frames its strategies from a customer-perspective rather than the previously predominant account-perspective."

In addition to revenue enhancement, the data warehouse also reduces ICICI's customer acquisition costs, a major benefit in a highly competitive environment. Managers can now optimize channel decisions using the data warehouse. "Preliminary estimates of savings in the cost of customer acquisition through the cross-sell channel versus the regular channel have been encouraging," Dalal says.

Future dividends
ICICI plans to expand its current data warehousing implementation to more users, more data and more channels. While already achieving impressive results, ICICI believes the Teradata warehouse still only scratches the surface. Kochhar remarks, "The bank believes that there is still a long way to go and that there is a great deal more potential in the Teradata solution than is currently being realized. To this end, the bank now has put in place a roadmap to expand the scope of the warehouse and extract greater value out of it."

The roadmap places the Teradata Warehouse squarely at the center of ICICI's customer relationships. "The bank foresees the Teradata warehouse to be a central repository of all operational and customer information," Kochhar continues. "This central repository would form the basis for building a business intelligence environment."

The next implementation phase will deploy Teradata's Campaign Management solution. At the same time, ICICI will migrate from the current single node SMP WorldMark 4400 server to a dual node MPP WorldMark 4485 server with Teradata Database V2R4. Call center and Web transactions will be incorporated, and the core user team will expand to 15.

Future campaigns run from the warehouse will move beyond target marketing and allow the bank to respond to customer activities and events. "The immediate focus is to build powerful campaign management capabilities including transforming from a pure target marketing-led approach to one that is customer induced," Bagchi says.

Even with 10 million customers, ICICI can bring every household into focus, creating a clear picture of each customer's accounts and needs. By strategizing with this customer perspective, ICICI is poised to satisfy more customers, one at a time. T

Tim Walters, president of InfoTech Marketing and adjunct professor in the University of Denver's Technology Management program, specializes in applying information and technology to solve marketing problems.

ILLUSTRATION BY GREG SPALENKA

Teradata Magazine - Q1 2003