Entrusting KM to improve communications for banks and their customers

Identifying customer channel usage

Executives at Lakeland Bank, based in New Jersey, have similar thoughts about Fiserv, which the bank uses for its core processing. When they decided two years ago that they needed wider and more granular knowledge management capabilities, they turned to Fiserv’s analytical reporting engines for better insight into branch traffic, online banking transactions and mobile banking usage.

“We needed to ramp up our data usage,” says Carl Grau, senior VP for business intelligence and electronic banking. “We have a very competitive industry.”

Part of the bank’s strategy to compete is growth through acquisition. The complexities of integrating acquired financial institutions into Lakeland took precedence over completing the installation of the Fiserv analytical solutions, so the bank didn’t go live with the system until about 18 months ago, according to Grau.

Increasingly, the competition comes not just from other financial institutions, but also from companies such as Google and Apple, trying to grab their own slice of the financial services pie with their payments products. Additionally, the bank needed increasingly detailed information to satisfy regulators. Key to addressing those issues is detailed knowledge regarding customer use of each of the banking channels, Grau says.

Fiserv analytical solutions provide dashboards that show bank executives activity in the different channels, enabling the bank to maximize its efficiencies. They include Business Analytics Retail Online Reporting for Premier (online), Business Analytics Mobiliti Reporting for Premier (mobile banking), Business Analytics CheckFree RXP Reporting for Premier (online bill pay) and Business Analytics Integrated Teller Reporting for Premier (branch activity). Premier is the name of Lakeland Bank’s core account processing platform.

Appropriate strategies

The teller module reports activity on an hourly basis so the bank can staff accordingly. Grau says, “We want to be able to run our branches with as little staff as possible. This provides us a bird’s-eye view of our staffing needs.”

By collating changes in branch activity, which is declining throughout the financial services industry, officials can see if activity is moving to other channels at Lakeland or away from the bank. Such information is fed to the bank’s marketing team to develop appropriate strategies.

Better fraud monitoring is another benefit because the analytics engine can spot anomalous behavior, such as a person logging in from a laptop in the rural United States one day and from mainland China the next day, Grau says. Another advantage is that the dashboards make the information quickly understandable by upper management without the need to develop lengthy reports, he adds.

Grau expects to expand his use of analytics from Fiserv when a small business banking module becomes available sometime later this year.