KEY POINTS:
Kiwibank has invested in "business intelligence" technology in a bid to better track and analyse the banking behaviour of its fast-growing customer base.
The six-year-old NZ Post subsidiary has been on an aggressive marketing drive and said in August it had close to 650,000 customers and was signing up about 2000 new customers each week.
But that rapid growth has presented challenges for Kiwibank's number-crunching analysts, whose jobs involve delving into the bank's IT systems for insights into how specific products and services are selling.
The bank admits even simple queries of its databases, such as how many customers it has, have in the past generated inconsistent answers because of the way account information was stored.
"The approach wasn't meeting the needs of the business people we deliver reporting to, and it was quite time-consuming for report developers to source the required data and build the reports," said Tracy Bellamy, the bank's management information systems strategy and delivery manager.
This prompted the bank to set up a new business intelligence (BI) technology platform from IBM subsidiary Cognos, following the lead of a growing number of larger organisations now using BI to analyse burgeoning volumes of customer data.
Kiwibank says the new BI platform will allow it to obtain a "unique profile" on customers and analyse the products and services they are buying, and where and how they are buying them.
"This will be of significant benefit to senior managers, product marketing managers, relationship managers and business analysts across the business," the bank says.
IT research firm Gartner rates BI as among the top technologies businesses should be investing in and said last month BI "can have a direct positive impact on a company's business performance, dramatically improving its ability to accomplish its mission by making smarter decisions at every level of the business from corporate strategy to operational processes".
Fallout from the global credit crisis has panicked many businesses into halting major projects including IT upgrades.
Another IT research firm, IDC, this month significantly cut back its prediction for next year's global spending on IT. It had previously forecast worldwide IT spending would grow by 5.9 per cent next year, but has now trimmed that prediction back to 2.6 per cent growth.
Gartner, meanwhile, said technology such as BI, which is aimed at enabling businesses to make more-informed decisions, was "particularly valuable in a difficult business environment".
Bellamy said "ongoing support" from Kiwibank's senior management team had been an important part of the success of developing the BI platform.
That support appears to have been anchored by Kiwibank chief executive Sam Knowles' enthusiasm for using technology to help grow the bank's business. In an interview with iStart magazine last year, Knowles said technology was central to the success of any bank.
"In some ways banking is technology. If you look at the way banking has evolved over the last 30 or 40 years it's all about technology, so the future of banking is pretty much underpinned by the evolution of technology," he told iStart.
"That's largely because banking is all about processes and what technology does is allows you to do processes more effectively. Sometimes it allows you to do processes you already do with [fewer] people but generally it allows you to do things that you couldn't do without technology, whether it's a sales process or service process like banking on the internet."
INTELLIGENT BANKING
* Business intelligence (BI) is a growing area of business technology focused on analysing customer data so managers can make better, faster decisions.
* Kiwibank is turning to BI to analyse the choices its customers make when selecting its products and services.
* This information is expected to benefit the bank's senior managers, product marketing managers, relationship managers and business analysts.
