Oxxford Information Technology has developed a financial data base to help banks market to business customers.
The Business Owner Wealth DataBase combines a bank's retail and commercial customer information with data from 60 outside sources to develop a broad picture of customer needs.
The outside sources include private data bases, commercial credit companies, and more than 40 government divisions.
How useful Oxxford's new data base will be depends on a bank's organizational strategy, said Bill Bradway, a principal with Meridien Research, a Needham, Mass.-based consulting firm.
For a bank that prefers to keep its corporate and retail operations separate, the offering may "not have much of an appeal," Mr. Bradway said.
However, for a bank that is "really focused on trying to embrace the individual customer and all of their relationships, it would be of interest-because they're going after share of wallet and trying to maximize the total value of the bank's relationship with the customer," Mr. Bradway said.
Oxxford, based in New York, began developing its data base two-and-a- half years ago.
To generate complete profiles of business owners, the software matches data about them with data about their businesses. When Oxxford receives a bank's customer information files, it matches the customers against information on 10 million business owners.
Banks can choose the format in which results are delivered. Each bank also receives a written executive summary of the information delivered in the data base.
The company can update data bases on a quarterly or semiannual basis.
Mr. Bradway noted that part of Oxxford's undertaking-trying to pull information from a particular person or business from a variety of data bases-can be difficult.
Any consumer can be identified in a variety of ways on different data bases, and this complicates the process of consolidating information on individual customers.
But Clifford J. Brundage, executive vice president of Oxxford, said its systems are designed to overcome that problem.
