Innovative Success Story: SunTrust Banks

ISI and SunTrust Build a Strong Relationship
for Householding Success

SunTrust Banks, Inc. is one of the nation's largest commercial banking organizations. Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, the company operates an extensive distribution network primarily in Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Tennessee, Virginia and the District of Columbia, and also serves customers in selected markets nationwide.

SunTrust's primary businesses include deposit, credit, trust, and investment services. Through various subsidiaries, the company provides credit cards, mortgage banking, insurance, brokerage, and capital markets services.

Business Objective
SunTrust takes pride in being a customer-focused organization. Identifying and understanding the bank's full relationship with the millions of customer households is critical to executing its customer-centered strategies. Historically, the process of creating households had been outsourced to a large marketing services provider that updated the bank's profiles on a monthly basis.

Although monthly updates had served the bank's business needs in the past, SunTrust determined that more frequent updates were required to keep pace with their increasingly sophisticated marketing strategies. Since increasing the frequency of the updates would become cost prohibitive using their current service provider, SunTrust's marketing officials decided to bring this important process in-house. In doing so, the marketing group felt that they could achieve two valuable business objectives: obtain updates on a more timely basis, and at the same time, reduce costs.

Selecting ISI
Together, the SunTrust marketing and information technology groups established three primary selection criteria for their software evaluation. The marketing department's first priority was to implement a solution that would provide householding results similar to their existing process. They wanted to ensure that the change would be transparent to the end-users who rely on the householding information for their sales, service and marketing activities. Above all, they did not want the transition to disrupt business.

The second selection criterion was ease-of-implementation and maintenance. SunTrust wanted a solution that was powerful enough to meet their current business and technology needs, and also flexible enough to allow them to easily make changes as these needs evolve.

Finally, SunTrust wanted a solution that would deliver the lowest total cost of ownership.
According to Greg Holzwarth, senior vice president of SunTrust's customer information management group, "Innovative Systems provided us with the best overall value. Their software easily met our established standard for householding results, and was significantly more cost-effective than our established service provider's solution.

"ISI offered us the right solution the first time," Holzwarth added. "They had a clear understanding of our business and technology needs. Based on this, and the proven quality of their software, we felt confident that ISI was a company with which we could build a long-term partnership."

Alternative Project Path
SunTrust evaluated ISI's version 5.0 open systems data linking software. This batch software provided individual matching, corporate matching, and retail and corporate householding. Although the software met the bank's three primary selection criteria, one important issue did not match: platform availability.

SunTrust needed a mainframe solution. Although ISI is known for its mainframe expertise and processing performance, it had not yet released its mainframe 5.0 version. The 5.0 version would include new and enhanced GUIs for improved ease-of-use and maintenance that were part of SunTrust's selection criteria. In spite of this obstacle, SunTrust selected ISI with the understanding that the mainframe 5.0 version would be available within a few months.

Shortly after being selected by SunTrust, ISI determined that re-architecting its data quality and data linking software products into a seamless customer data integration system, to be called i/Lytics, would provide a more optimum solution for clients, including SunTrust. Recognizing that this redesign would require more development time than the 5.0 software, the two companies devised an alternative plan in which ISI would provide the required householding processing to SunTrust until development of its new end-to-end customer data integration solution was complete.

Working Together for Project Success
The plan called for ISI to perform SunTrust's monthly householding runs for them until the i/Lytics mainframe data linking software was up and operational. SunTrust also installed ISI's open systems 5.0 data linking software in a test environment to help the organization evaluate both the ISI results and their own business rules for householding.

"ISI was a very cooperative and supportive partner," said David Sproat, group vice president of SunTrust's information technology group. "Together, our project teams have worked through the ups and downs. Even though the implementation took an alternative route, we were always confident that their folks would provide us the support that we needed to be successful. In fact, their very experienced delivery team was extremely helpful in working through any problems we encountered. This kind of partnership from a software provider is certainly unique."

An added benefit was that SunTrust's marketing officials gained additional time to evaluate and update their existing business rules and householding processing logic before the new system went into operation.

"Bringing the householding process in-house required a detailed examination and testing of our historic householding business logic," commented Holzwarth. "We found that some rules and assumptions that had worked well for us in the past no longer made sense in today's environment. In revisiting these rules, and having an environment in which to investigate new rules and logic, we were able to effectively establish improved business requirements and householding logic."

Results
ISI's i/Lytics mainframe software is now in operation at SunTrust. The bank's investment in time and resources to bring this function in-house has resulted in total control of its customer householding process. The company is now able to increase the frequency of householding its millions of customers as their business needs demand, without incurring additional costs from a third-party service provider.

i/Lytics' sophisticated processing capability provides the marketing officials with a hierarchical view of their traditional retail and corporate households, and also identifies households comprised of both retail and corporate members.

Since SunTrust implemented the advanced i/Lytics software architecture, they can easily leverage the product's capabilities for future customer data quality initiatives. The marketing officials are currently considering an initiative that would expand their use of
i/Lytics to include customer-level identification and matching.

Finally, ISI has also provided SunTrust with another valuable benefit: reduced householding costs. The SunTrust marketing group estimates that moving to ISI has already saved them hundreds of thousands of dollars - and they expect a total project payback to be achieved within 8 months of the project's initiation.

"We are extremely satisfied with ISI and their i/Lytics software," said Holzwarth. "It's easy to reference a happy customer when the project goes according to plan. To reference a happy customer when the project takes a detour along the way is unusual. The fact that we are so satisfied with them is a testament to their expertise and dedication to ensuring that their customers' needs are met. ISI certainly proved that they were not just a vendor, but rather a partner to our success. We look forward to a long relationship with ISI," concluded Holzwarth.

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