MCIF power: the next generation.

• Author: Bernstal, Janet Bigham
• Position: Marketing customer information file - Cover Story

Discovering who's who in your customer base using the "marketing customer information file" (MCIF) isn't a new concept. The tool has been available since the mid-80s, offering a more complete view of the customer through profitability and householding reports.

As with most technology, early MCIF applications have gone through several evolutions, improving how data is entered, captured and scrubbed. Even delivery has changed dramatically, eliminating what once were some tedious processes.

"It's nice to have the work as automated as possible," explains Cindy Kapila, data analyst for Central Bancompany Technology Services, part of a holding company for 13 individual community banks in Missouri. "We schedule standard monthly cross-sell reports, and once I make the reports up for each bank, they run by themselves."

Central Bancompany has used MCIF technology since 1992. When Kapila started in 1997, the system was sturdy but somewhat inflexible, she says, allowing only basic reporting. Today they use Fiserv's WalletShare, which enables Kapila to run the monthlies as well as more customized weekly lists, based on profitability and segment management. To access reports, each bank logs on to a Web portal that can be personalized to individual users.

"We're varied enough that they all have different ways they like to run reports," says Kapila. "They can choose from a variety of prompted reports for everyday things, such as accounts that are maturing and need contact, or customers over a certain balance. It's up to them how they want to market to the customer."

In addition to what Kapila calls the routine "who's profitable" marketing for the banks, she uses the MCIF capabilities to see how well the promotions for the larger holding company are doing.

"We use the MCIF to pull the list, and then we check the results of it," says Kapila. "It's campaign tracking in a big way, looking at how much money we made and which type of customer contact worked best."

Product design and fee decisions are also based on MCIF intelligence.

"Before, they didn't have the data pooled to show what accounts a customer had or who used the call center or the Internet," claims Kapila. "That's been a real convenience that we increasingly rely on."

Not many small or community banks can afford to have a full-time analyst like Kapila decode their MCIF data. For this reason, these banks miss the advantages of gathering enough marketing intelligence to sell the right products to the right people.

"That's the bane of the industry because, before the tech crash, banks thought nothing about spending on all the [MCIF] software, but needed someone to operate it," says Gene Palm, president and chief operating officer of Profit Resources in Lakeland, Fla. As a result, the implementation of full MCIF capabilities was never completed at many institutions, he observes.

He has noticed that a small industry of MCIF consultants has cropped up in the past few years to fill in the "intelligence gaps" left as a result of the banks' failure to make full use of the systems. That's a positive trend, he says, because proper use of database-marketing people with an MCIF can generate serious cash for these banks.

"Database is the black box," explains Jeri Shobe, a database consultant whose San Francisco-based company, Insight Database Marketing Solutions, works frequently with credit unions and community banks. "The success depends on how many questions you ask and how thoughtful the questions are."

Shobe is often asked to build "matrix mail" programs that let banks target certain segments. For...