Suruga Bank, a leading regional Japanese bank, has launched a strategic information platform that Accenture (ACN) helped build to further personalize and customize the products and services the bank offers to its customers.
The new platform enhances Suruga Bank's delivery of relevant and timely financial products to customers through sophisticated analysis of customer characteristics, behavioral interests and life events. It is designed to continuously adapt to new inputs in customer activity, and complements Suruga Bank's mission to provide personalized services to its clients. It may also help the regional bank, which is based in Shizuoka Prefecture, expand its business across Japan into new markets.
"The platform improves our ability to truly respond to our customers' needs and preferences by helping us customize their financial products and services," said Yoshihiro Okazaki, senior managing executive officer, customer support division, Suruga Bank. "Furthermore, it strengthens our bank's role as a life and business concierge for our customers. Suruga Bank has a long history of outstanding customer service and this platform strengthens that capability."
The bank's new platform, which was built by Accenture, provides more flexible customer insight capabilities by linking the bank's customer relationship management application with the data warehouse from Teradata, analytics functions provided by SAS and a dashboard provided by MicroStrategy. By applying Accenture's operational architecture, the platform will help reduce the bank's IT maintenance costs and give the bank more flexibility to handle increasing mobile banking volumes and to link to other systems.
"Retail banking is becoming increasingly important to the Japanese financial services industry," said Kentaro Mori, a managing director in Accenture's Financial Services operating group in Japan. "The rollout of this platform comes at a time when digital is fundamentally changing the way organizations operate and interact with customers. It presents a great opportunity for the bank by moving from a one-size-fits-all approach to more individualized and customized services. Based on our deep industry knowledge and long-standing analytics and systems development expertise, provided through Accenture Analytics, we continue to provide new and innovative solutions to financial institutions that are looking to transform and achieve new competitive advantages."