That was until last year, when NatWest Group’s multi-disciplinary team of data scientists, engineers, translators and business product owners developed the innovative customer lifetime-value framework (CLTV). The framework has revolutionised the bank’s understanding of customer behaviour, the value that different behaviours bring and how this evolves over time.
The CLTV supports NatWest’s new customer-centric strategy. Achieving the organisation’s ambitious strategic aims depended on understanding the current and future needs of its customers. Data had to be at the heart of this conversation. Accelerating the time taken to get messages out to new customers, down from three to four months to three to four weeks, was key to transforming the customer experience.
Through the lens of the CLTV, the team pooled previously fragmented sources of data into a single data asset within NatWest’s big data platform. The asset contains over 400 billion rows of data, each containing hundreds of attributes that can be used to model and understand the lifetime-value of each of the bank’s customers.
Insights generated from the new data store are used to predict a customer’s future needs, allowing NatWest to tailor its engagement on issues such as financial health and potential loan or mortgage requirements. The asset is also informing marketing strategy, with the bank’s first data-driven, targeted marketing campaigns launched at the start of the year.
The campaigns have been hugely successful. The bank is looking to develop a similar approach across its broader commercial business. Zack Anderson, chief data and analytics officer at NatWest Group said: “The CLTV lab has been a great success. We have quickly gone from ideas on a page through to the creation of a fantastic data asset that is generating insights that we are now using to support our customers. This is just the start of the journey with a lot more to come.”
