Here’s a fun professional sales riddle: What’s the biggest problem with a handshake? Answer: it’s pretty tough to offer more than one at a time.
For years, Regions Bank, a subsidiary of Fortune 500 member Regions Financial Corporation, cultivated its commercial banking customer relationships the old-fashioned way: high-touch communication, personal engagement, and, yes, lots and lots of handshakes. But over time, success became its own bottleneck: such practices weren’t scalable as accounts multiplied, meaning commercial account relationship managers were faced with more and more data to sift through and less time to do it.
“Our bankers are tremendous—they’re working with their customers on a daily basis,” said Manav Misra, Regions’ Chief Data and Analytics Officer. “But it’s impossible for a human being to really have a full grasp of everything that’s happening with a company that they’re working with.”
But the modern digital data era is shaping that precise customer expectation: that each relationship manager (RM) should know exactly what is happening within their company, industry, and market. Commercial customers are increasingly expecting Regions’ RMs to be more informed, more intuitive about their needs, and more valuable than ever before.
For Regions’ commercial banking business to continue to grow, it needed to transform—handshakes weren’t enough anymore. Misra’s team, along with strategic partner Boston Consulting Group (BCG), started envisioning an analytics-driven relationship management solution.
“Commercial banking has traditionally been a handshake business—it’s a high-touch business,” Misra said. “And we wanted to bring high-tech to the high-touch so as to better meet our customers’ needs.”
The Revenue Analytics Solution
Both of the challenges facing Regions’ RMs—data overload and customer expectations—carried a common solve: a smarter relationship management solution that could turn reams of customer data into informed account insights. If Regions could identify and combine the right customer data points, such a solution could then use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms to equip relationship managers with recommended actions or relationship threats.
Before development on such a solution could begin, all the necessary customer data had to be combined in one place—and that meant collecting billions of individual data points into a newly-installed on-premise data lake. Regions also had to incorporate external data streams to build more accurate company personas.
Once the necessary data aggregation was complete, Regions and BCG’s advanced analytics teams started sculpting exactly what kind of insights the initial iteration of the solution would be able to provide. They settled on three functionalities—or “modules”—for version 1.0: a solution recommendation module, which helped RMs identify which Regions solution offerings would be best suited for their customers; a relationship retention module, which identified customer accounts that were at risk of attrition; and a fiscal health analytics module, which could alert RMs which customers might be approaching financial distress in the months to come.
In tandem, those three modules could transform and streamline how Regions’ RMs interact with customers. Valuable insights for just one customer in any one of those categories used to take hours to generate; now, any RM could get insights across all three, for all of their customers, in just minutes. It was exactly what RMs needed, and that was no accident: Regions and BCG engaged RMs from the businesses early during the ideation stage and into the development and rollout stages to ensure the end solution aligned to their practical needs.
"It was very important for us to make sure that we had champions that we brought into the design phase itself, so they got a sense of ownership in the product," Misra said. "They gave feedback early, they were the first adopters, and then—as the product started to take shape—there was a constant feedback cycle from them to enhance the product."
Just six months after Regions first identified the market need, the 1.0 version of the solution—called the Revenue Analytics Solution—launched to a pilot group of RMs. Now, Regions is on version 3.0, with added modules for new account prospecting and liquidity analysis. RM buy-in is near universal.
"This really gives our RMs a leg up, because when they have a conversation with the customer, it isn't just going out and talking about how their favorite football team is doing and then hope that you're going to pull out some nuggets around what potential opportunities exist," Misra said. "Now, we have a much more streamlined process for identifying those opportunities and closing them much faster."
A team effort
For Misra, the solution’s success is because of the team approach underpinning its development. Along with BCG’s strategic guidance and advanced analytics team, the revenue analytics solution was built by Regions’ people, for Regions’ people—relying on talent from a wide variety of departments.
"If we treated this just as a model that my team built, we would not have been successful," Misra said. "Everyone was part of one team working towards the goal of delivering the product—and that sense of joint ownership between the business unit and my team was necessary for us to be successful."
And a core part of that collaborative team effort was BCG, simultaneously serving as consultative partner and solution developer.
“This solution was co-created with Regions Bank from day one,” said Bhavi Mehta, BCG Managing Director and Partner. “Our companies’ business, technology, and data science teams worked together—shoulder-to-shoulder—in an iterative fashion to bring this to life.”
The solution’s impact—and the proof of machine learning’s utility within the organization—spread quickly throughout the company. Fast forward to present day, and Regions now has numerous intelligent solutions in production. A natural language processing based tool called RVOiCe—Regions Voice of the Customer—helps compile and assess customer feedback across a wide variety of channels, for example. Misra’s team even delivered a graph analytics solution that helps fraud analysts identify and understand potential money laundering patterns.
But in many ways, the revenue analytics solution was the first chapter of Regions’ steadily evolving data journey—and it earned that status through its customer impact.
“At the end of the day, we’re in the business of helping our clients be successful in their financial journey,” Misra said. “So if we’re much better prepared to have those conversations, our customers get more value and better service out of every interaction with their bankers.”
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Boston Consulting Group.
