UnionBank of the Philippines is tapping into the potential of data to significantly enhance customer engagement as government initiatives in the Philippines encourage industry players to offer digital products.
With more digital activity, UnionBank’s sales teams saw opportunities to deliver more compelling offerings to customers, such as cross-selling bancassurance products (insurance plans sold through banks).
As competition grew, UnionBank also needed to automate manual processes that could identify new prospects and meet customer needs faster.
In addition, to maximise sales and engagement touchpoints, UnionBank needed a deeper understanding of customer profiles.
“Our aim is to continue being a digital banking trailblazer in the Philippines, and we believe data is the cornerstone to help us achieve that,” said Dennis Omila, chief information and operations officer at UnionBank.
“We sought to harness data to drive digital transformation to stay ahead of these banking trends by meeting the needs of digital-savvy users and mitigating risk,” said Omila.
As such, UnionBank built the Data Vault platform—a centralised, organised, clean, governed, and easily accessible repository of quality data sources and assets.
Using Cloudera technologies as a core foundation, the Data Vault enabled UnionBank’s developers to create data-centric applications and solutions with quality and governed data assets.
This was realised by opening data management capabilities to application programming interfaces (APIs), business process automation (BPA), robotic process automation (RPA), and low-code development platforms.
Supported by Cloudera, UnionBank data scientists and business users worked together to further leverage Cloudera’s tools to use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
They did so to build new capabilities such as AI-based ‘look-alike’ models and intelligent recommendations for products like bancassurance, credit cards, and auto loans.
“Utilising platforms such as Cloudera has allowed us to accelerate our ability to develop insightful models that ultimately create more value for our customers. Our pursuit of innovative AI and data science technology will continue to help us develop even more impactful projects in the near future,” said David R. Hardoon, chief data and AI officer at UnionBank.
UnionBank has improved its cross-selling capabilities via AI-powered “look-alike” models.
For bancassurance products, the new model leverages data such as customers’ average daily balance on record or the relationship manager’s personal network of customers to create more leads.
By the end of 2021, there was a 138% increase in total bancassurance bookings.
The models have also helped UnionBank achieve 187% (telesales) and 237% (electronic direct mailers or EDMs) increases in average monthly conversion rate in credit cards.
They also improved monthly auto loans conversion rates by 178% (EDMs). They have also brought about a multitude of business and process improvements including more time saved, higher conversion rates, and better affinity with customers.
Building on this successful momentum, UnionBank intends to further utilise data and AI/ML to drive more business value by exploring solutions such as Cloudera, which manages and secures big data lifecycles in any cloud or data center.
The bank also plans to accelerate more AI projects, reducing their operational time from months to weeks.
“With AI, UnionBank has the capabilities to apply hyper-personalisation and even greater customisation across all our products. We can also improve other operations such as loan approvals for our customers,” Omila added.
