Celent predicts financial institutions will spend US$840 million by 2004 on Customer Profitability Analytics (CPAs). Celent expects marketing professionals will be increasingly compelled to align their CRM strategies with customer profitability considerations.

In a new report, "Ranking the Vendors of Customer Profitability Analytics," Celent Communications examines the adoption of Customer Profitability Analytics in the North American financial industry and provides a ranking of leading vendors in this arena.

While North American financial institutions have recently made dramatic efforts to analyze their profitability at the customer level, many institutions still lag behind when it comes to use the metrics in an operational manner. So far, marketing departments have expressed little interest in dealing with metrics, which have typically been the financial department's bailiwick. Celent estimates that, of the CPAs in use at North American financial institutions, 98% are run in financial department, with only 40% of financial institutions passing the information to the marketing department. “Because of the need to align CRM strategies to profitability considerations, marketers will have to pay more attention to customer profitability data beyond typical marketing metrics such as cross-selling, customer acquisition cost, and attrition rate,” comments Gwenn Bézard, author of the report.

Among the forces driving the popularization of Customer Profitability Analytics, Celent identifies the shift from product to customer-centricity and one-to-one marketing, the quest for channel management, the need to better manage scarce resources in a recession context, and the war on customer attrition. “Customer profitability analytics will have an significant effect on the banking industry in the next decade, just as it has in the credit card industry in the 1990s,” adds Bézard.

The report ranks the solutions provided by 8 vendors, including CoreProfit, EarningsInsights, HNC Software, IPS-Sendero, Metavante, NCR Teradata, PeopleSoft and SunGard BancWare.