Executive Course for Top Managers of Indian Banks at UGent
Today, the four-day course of “Predictive Analytics for Customer Intelligence in Financial Services” came to a close. Banking has been a favorite research topic of Prof. Dr. Dirk Van den Poel’s research in the field of analytical customer relationship management (aCRM). That’s why India’s leading think tank for banking, IDRBT (Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology, established by the Reserve Bank of India and located in Hyderabad, India), got in touch with us. In particular, Dr. Vadlamani Ravi organized the event from the side of India with extensive support from IDRBT leadership. We decided to compile a program with a mixture of aCRM talks as well as presentations about hot topics in marketing.
The first day started off with an extensive presentation by Prof. Dr. Dirk Van den Poel about the fundamentals of customer intelligence. Next, Anthony Bosschem (Talking Heads, see picture below) gave an interesting talk about social media, and how they can be integrated into the traditional “hierarchy-of-effects models” in marketing communications with a special focus on ROI of social media.
Thursday 18 August 2011
Monday afternoon, we continued with the fundamentals of customer intelligence: customer acquisition, churn, cross-sell, and win-back. This was followed by a talk by Prof. Dr. Ralf Wagner (University of Kassel, Germany) and Mr. Lenard Gödecke (Scholz - Wagner & Partner & ELBE 19, Hamburg), who both flew in from Hamburg to give their talk on a status report of European banking. Moreover, the topic of segmentation in the banking sector was discussed in detail.
Tuesday morning, August 16th, we started with a talk by Dr. Dries Benoit (picture to the right). He presented his doctoral research about quantile regression. Its relevance to analytical CRM was particularly highlighted for the analysis of customer lifetime value in financial services. The morning session ended with a very inspiring presentation by Mr. Quinten Fraai (Head of internet banking at ING Belgium, see picture below).
An Colle (Deloitte Consulting, Advanced Business Analytics specialist), an MMA graduate was next to present a study using VAR (Vector AutoRegressive) models for CLV modeling. Mr. Nicolas Brenard (Head of Customer Follow-up at Deutsche Bank Belgium) was next to present their approach to predictive analytics.
Wednesday morning, the Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration at Ghent University, Prof. Dr. Marc De Clercq, started the day with his address to the Indian top executives. Next, the program kicked off with a talk by Nicole Huyghe (Managing Director at Solutions 2, see picture below) about pricing research in financial services. In particular, she explained the benefits of conjoint analysis to force customers into making trade-offs to enhance the information extracted from market research.
Prof. Dr. Anita Prinzie (Senior Business Analyst at Solutions 2 & visiting professor at Ghent University) talked about her research on sequence analysis in financial services.
Lunch breaks were also organized on campus in our Department of Marketing. Vegetarian Indian food was provided by the Raj restaurant.
Dr. Sarah Steenhaut (Callebout & Co and Why5 research) presented a talk on market research insights for financial services.
Next, Mr. Philippe Baecke as well as Mr. Michel Ballings (both UGent) presented their studies on data augmentation.
The final presentation on Wednesday was by Mr. Emmanuel Verhagen (Psilogy) about building meaningful brand conversations.
Thursday, the final day, started with a presentation by Prof. Dr. Dirk Van den Poel & Mr. Andrey Volkov about Marketing Optimization for analytical CRM.
Dr. Patrick Glenisson (Head of Customer Analytics and Market Research at KBC Bank) provided a lot of insights into the organization as well as evolutionary aspects of how to set up and grow an analytics group.
Lunch breaks as well as tea/coffee breaks provided a lot of opportunities for informal talks among the participants as well as with the speakers.
The executive course ended with talks by Mr. Johan Goossens (The House of Marketing), and Mr. Koen Delvaux (Medemerkers).
Finally, we would like to thank all speakers and mainly the participants for the many interesting discussions. Let’s not forget the support staff, in particular our departmental secretary: Karin Rigole. We look forward to the next visit by IDRBT with a delegation of Indian banks.
