Abbey National estimates that installation of UK-based Avellino's data profiling and analysis product Discovery has saved the bank an estimated £15.2 million.
The banking group is using Discovery to profile data and deliver complete customer information and business intelligence from a central enterprise data warehouse to marketing and customer services departments, among others.
Avellino says the system enables the bank to pinpoint issues for resolution within databases and the warehouse, thereby raising data quality levels.
The UK bank has put customer relationship management at the top of its list of business priorites after being badly burned by an ill-advised foray into the wholesale markets.
Christine Craven, head of retail information, Abbey National, says improved data quality is helping refine and improve the bank's overall marketing processes: "Avellino Discovery is helping us to optimise our return on investment in a centralised approach to data management. More detailed results are helping campaign managers to determine whether or not it's worth running a campaign to a particular market segment."
In addition, she says the software is helping the bank deliver data integration related IT investments faster, more cost-effectively and with less risk by reducing the time and expense of manually analysing data as well as effectively identifying potential trouble spots.
"Without Discovery, we estimate that it would take around five man-years to manually check the 29 million records that need migrating [from the data warehouse] into the new customer database," says Craven. "With Discovery automating much of the process, we estimate this activity will instead take around three man-months."
Breaking down the estimated cost savings, Abbey National says more efficient integration of Life data into the central data architecture delivered £1 million net present value (NPV)and the speedier migration of databases an estimated £2.5 million NPV. In addition, data cleansing, with analysis provided by the Discovery system, has netted the bank £1.7 million in savings, and more accurate bad debt provisioning and credit scoring has led to over £10 million in NPV benefits.