The new Cognos Customer Segment Performance Blueprint enables managers to tap into vast amounts of customer data, create real intelligence on behaviour, revenue streams and profitability by customer or groups of customers. These insights can be used to effectively target, plan, track and measure new sales and marketing initiatives aimed at improving profitability and strengthening customer loyalty and satisfaction.

"Understanding what drives customer profitability is the Holy Grail in retail banking," said Eugene McCarthy, head of profitability measurement in Bank of Ireland's retail division. "With the help of Cognos, we have been able to increase our understanding of our customer base, across all product businesses, as well as provide our customer relationship managers with meaningful, actionable information that impacts their decision-making process. Customer data is much more consumable and therefore, much more strategic to our organisation."

Offered in two versions - one for corporate banking, and the other designed specifically for retail banks - the new Cognos Customer Segment Performance Blueprint capitalises on market-leading and integrated functionality found in Cognos 8 Planning and Cognos 8 BI. Specifically, bank managers can benefit from:
Intuitive dashboards and reports to monitor performance across customer segments, a single customer segment, and even individual customers

All costing and profitability insight is created via Acorn System's Performance Analyser Application. This assigns general ledger costs, revenues, and resources through business processes to precisely determine the baseline cost and profitability of individual customers, segments, channels, branches, products and even transactions, based on historical performance.

"Knowing which customers are making and losing money, and why, at the net profit level, is an essential foundation of any customer segmentation strategy that includes improving profitability as one of it''s goals," said Chris D. Fraga, chief strategy officer at Acorn Systems Inc. "Armed with this insight, companies are increasing the profitability of their existing customer portfolio by aligning customer service levels to profit contributions, increasing business velocity with profitable segments, and re-negotiating favourable terms and pricing to maintain these profitable customers. Companies are also growing net new revenue profitably by proactively targeting profitable customer segments with marketing campaigns focused on profitable products and services. The integration of Acorn's accurate content with Cognos Planning and BI combines all the right ingredients to enable companies to make better business decisions from a profit perspective."

"Banking executives are recognising the significant impact that declining customer loyalty and high turnover can have on profit margins. Yet, implementing competitive customer value propositions has traditionally had its challenges - disparate and often inaccurate customer data; initiative plans that are not tied to overall corporate plans and forecasts; and the reporting and analysis 'disconnect' that typically occurs with spreadsheet-based performance management processes," said Gaurav Verma, financial services industry director at Cognos. "The Cognos Customer Segment Performance Blueprint provides an integrated, closed-loop cycle that paves the way for continual customer segment performance improvement. Delivering an extremely high level of precision and segmentation ultimately leads to increased revenues, higher profits and a stronger customer experience."