How HTLF Personalizes the Banking Experience with Trusted Customer Profiles

The team also deployed Informatica Data Quality to improve the quality and completeness of customer information. For instance, HTLF applied Zip+4 codes to identify geographic segments within ZIP code delivery areas before matching and merging addresses.

“We needed an MDM solution we could trust, with householding capabilities built in,” says Terry. “Informatica allowed us to solve our challenges with grouping customers by household quickly. We used Informatica’s flexible party data model to incorporate our more complex customer profiles.”

If a customer has both retail and commercial relationships with the bank, HTLF enhanced the matching to include these different types of customer profiles. For example, instead of just having a separate commercial customer profile and a retail profile, HTLF can now combine these profiles with a unique combined ID that represents the master profile across the entire relationship. It can also assign a different profile ID specific to the commercial or retail relationship, helping credit, risk and sales teams zero in on the information they need to make lending decisions and financial services offers.

“With Informatica, we improved our matching capability for households and commercial customer profiles by approximately 20 percent,” says Terry. “We don’t yet know the full financial impact, but we know it’s going to be substantial.”

Using Informatica Data Quality to cleanse customer address information—ensuring consistent quality throughout the data's lifecycle—more than 85 percent of customer addresses were corrected, cleansed or updated, and the four percent of addresses that were previously undeliverable were reclaimed. Terry explains, “With that first pass through the data quality engine and using the Informatica tools, we fixed all those addresses, cleansed them. We're still determining the dollar savings in terms of eliminating undeliverable mail, mail being returned to us, the physical handling of it, and having to contact the customers.”

HTLF is already seeing some positive impacts on its business as a result of using Informatica to better segment customer data. The solution saves employee and development time, and also enables the bank to enhance the customer sales experience, acquire new customers, and reduce attrition.

“Informatica gives us a scalable platform to develop a system of record for customer data that we can build upon,” says Terry. “We’ve flipped the paradigm of being account-centric to being customer-centric. We’re enabling the business to better understand our customers and how our relationships with them impact our business growth. We can also make progress toward important operational objectives, like fraud prevention and risk analysis across households.”

Customers will benefit as well, because they’ll see more accurate data as well as more relevant and timely product offers during mobile and in-branch experiences. Terry explains, “We can better serve customers by understanding them as individuals and not just as accounts. As such, we can better protect customers from fraud because we can look at potential threats across a household.”

Terry continues, “In addition, we can offer products or services that we might not have been able to before because we now understand the entire customer relationship with us. Becoming customer centric allows us to really affect the ability to be customer obsessed and leverage those relationships across our ecosystem.”