Lenders revamp Datawarehouse

Non-bank lender Aussie Home Loans (Aussie) has refined its reporting and decision-making with a data warehouse, in time for its launch into the mortgage market.

A year after the roll out of a data warehouse which allows predictive modeling, Aussie can use and tweak the data warehouse entirely in-house, independent of consultants, due to a successful transferring of skills and knowledge. This useful ability to enhance the data warehouse added support to Aussie's latest initiative, the Aussie Mortgage Market launched last month.

In late 2000, the lender realised that developing its customer intelligence was necessary to support strategic operational and planning decisions, thereby enhancing its competitive position.

Emilio Gazis, Aussie's senior manager customer knowledge, said. "We needed to develop a far more intimate knowledge of our 120,000 customers to enable us to improve the relevance of product offerings and tailor marketing campaigns to their needs."

"We saw a data warehouse as offering the in-depth reporting and analysis capabilities we wanted, combining information from a range of sources to give us an accurate and comprehensive picture of our customer base," he said.

An intensive scoping exercise began in May 2001 involving key stakeholders from across the Aussie Group. Aussie went to the market to find an expert implementation partner to help scope and build the data warehouse, and chose a solution from information management specialists, MIP.

Mr Gazis said, during the evaluations the choice of a partner was a more important factor than the technology used. "We evaluated three companies, looking at their methodologies, track records and knowledge levels. MIP impressed us with their expertise and enthusiasm, giving us a degree of confidence that they were equal to the challenge and a good fit for our business," he said.

Mr Gazis said Aussie set tight constraints in terms of the deadline and budget, and MIP delivered on both. MIP consultants worked on-site at Aussie as part of a close-knit project team for a three month period, providing project management and specialist data warehousing expertise, as well as a strong focus on skills and knowledge transfer.

The data warehouse MIP built for Aussie Home Loans runs on Microsoft SQL Server, and is refreshed weekly with data feeds from Aussie's Funders, Credit Card and Insurance partners, as well as from its own internal operational and CRM systems. At the behest of MIP, and to ensure data integrity, Aussie implemented MasterSoft International's NADIS, a suite of data integrity tools to clean existing data and maintain that standard through screening all new entries. NADIS matches customer names and addresses as part of the refresh process, eliminating any duplication of customer entries across the multiple data sources to ensure a high degree of data integrity.

The data warehouse first went live in September 2001, providing access to a range of reporting mechanisms, predictive modelling and customer analysis capabilities.

"We can now extract lists of different customer groupings, perform product and loan analysis, and conduct all sorts of management reporting in a far more timely manner," said Mr Gazis. As an example, Mr Gazis said Aussie recently conducted a predictive modelling exercise to identify customers with a high churn risk so the lender could target them with appropriate marketing campaigns designed to cement their loyalty.

Aussie has made a number of on-going enhancements to the system since it went live, both to incorporate the requirements of the new privacy legislation and to accommodate new products and services, Mr Gazis said.

For the full story on Aussie Home Loans business intelligence get the November/December 2002 issue of Image & Data Manager magazine. To subscribe online click here.