A Marketing Company Hones Its Own Growth Strategy with Detailed Bank Data

Banks are getting creative in their efforts to attract and maintain deposits as competition ramps up and funding pressures intensify. Some are turning to external marketing resources to sharpen their efforts to build the business, drawing on a combination of data, technology and third-party expertise to target specific sectors of the market.

This large marketing company works with banks to help them determine the right audiences for outreach and devise appropriate strategies for success. To aid its own efforts at finding the best clients to serve and then showing the positive impact of new marketing programs, the sales and account management teams were tracking a wide range of data on banks. This included information on where new branches were opening, the overall financial performance of a bank relative to its peer groups and metrics on credit quality and concentration. Much of this data was being provided by current and potential clients, which was then fed into a corporate CRM system. The teams wanted to eliminate the need to request these details from banks and find an appropriate source that could enhance their efforts with more comprehensive, reliable and timely data.

Pain Points

The sales and account management teams were working with data that was often stale. This hindered their efforts to locate the best banks to work with and develop dynamic plans to demonstrate the positive impact their marketing strategies were having on a business. The teams needed a more robust approach and were looking for a provider that could offer:    

• Extensive financial data on banks.
• Details on assets, deposits, loans and regulatory capital.
• Important metrics, such as credit quality, credit concentration and liquidity.
• Information on openings, closings and acquisitions of branches.
• Access to the data through a cloud-based system to easily integrate the information with internal applications.
  
  

The teams knew that S&P Global Market Intelligence ("Market Intelligence") was a premier provider of breaking news, financial data and expert analysis on banks, and reached out to learn more.

The Solution

Specialists from Market Intelligence discussed a number of highly relevant datasets that came to the firm with the acquisiiton of SNL Financial back in 2015. This included SNL Sector Financials, SNL Financial Institutions Regulatory data and SNL U.S. Branch data. Together, these capabilities would enable the sales and account management teams to:

	Closely evaluate the financial performance of banks	The SNL Sector Financials dataset covers industry-specific GAAP and IFRS as-reported financials for over 25,000 current and historical companies across the globe. [1] It supports a deep understanding of what is driving markets and surfaces risks and opportunities for a business. Five key sectors are covered, including financial institutions. The Financial Institutions (FIG) component, a combination of the banking and insurance sector, covers financial data for various financial institutions across the globe. Details include assets, deposits, loans and regulatory capital on 16,000+ banking institutions, plus investment, underwriting, solvency and distribution coverage for 2,000+ insurance companies.
	Assess metrics critical to a bank's success	The SNL Financial Institutions Regulatory dataset provides access to bank, credit union and financial service companies' financial statement filings. With 40,000+ operating companies and 100,000+ active and historical entities filed within the U.S., Mexico and Colombia regulatory agencies, users are able to comprehensively assess the financial standing of an organization relative to its peers. They can also track credit quality, credit concentration exposure and liquidity. The dataset includes as-reported data from: Call report financials: 031, 041, 051. Holding company financials: Y-9C. Large/Small parent financials: Y-9LP and Y-9SP. Credit union and corporate credit union financials: 5300, 5310. Specialized financial services: Form ADV, X-19.
	Track branch activity to finetune marketing plans	The SNL U.S. Branch dataset provides access to all U.S. branch information for banks, thrifts and credit unions captured daily from company websites, filings, merger news and government sources. The dataset includes: Key dates of openings, closings and acquisitions of branches. The annual deposit filing for each branch to assess branch performance. Company and/or branch market share on a geographic basis, with the geographic and demographic attributes for the markets in which those branches are located and the product rates offered at the branch.
	Gain efficient cloud-based access	Snowflake’s Cloud Data Platform is a Software as a Service (SaaS), so there is no hardware or software to select, install and manage. Accessing data from S&P Global and other providers via Snowflake enables users to obtain live, ready-to-query datasets that are always up-to-date and do not require transformation before using. This enables users to easily join external and internal data for faster and better business decisions. In addition, Snowflake is cloud agnostic enabling users to leverage a provider of choice, whether Amazon Web Services, Microsoft AZURE or Google Cloud Platform.

Key Benefits

Members of the sales and account management teams were excited by the opportunity to have the detailed and up-to-date information they needed to spur the company's growth initiatives with banks. They subscribed to all three datasets and are now benefiting from having:

1. The backing of a well-recognized information provider trusted by companies around the world.
2. Timely and detailed banking information to understand risks and opportunities to target new clients that are the best fit and assess the impact of ongoing campaigns with existing clients. 
3. Branch-specific details to customize marketing plans.
4. Automatic data retrieval through the cloud with information delivered into highly dynamic dashboards to have a bespoke look at business opportunities.
5. The ability to collaborate more effectively with the client strategy, product development and other teams that now can all draw upon a shared source of valuable strategic information.