Security Bank Corp. of Macon, Ga., says it is using statistical analysis to drive its acquisition and branch-building plans and intends to apply the technology to its marketing efforts as well.
James R. McLemore, an executive vice president and the chief financial officer, said the $2.5 billion-asset banking company has bought three Atlanta banks in the past 18 months and more than doubled its asset size in three years as it expanded into coastal Georgia.
When the company began an expansion effort in 2003, Mr. McLemore said, it wanted to use a disciplined approach to determine "the most attractive markets in Georgia that we might want to expand into."
Security turned to the online advisory group BancIntelligence.com Inc. in Atlanta, which offers analytical services called BancAnalyst Financial and BancAnalyst Market over the Internet.
The services let Security look "at a different cut of the call report data" that is available from all financial institutions, Mr. McLemore said. They also let the company analyze the demographics of the communities around those banks.
"In Atlanta there's a lot more publicly available data" because of the work of the Atlanta Regional Commission and other economic development groups, he said, but the analysis tool was "more effective in places like the coast of Georgia or the second-tier cities," where detailed data was less available, he said.
Richard Collinsworth, Security's chief operating officer and executive credit officer, said that the company now wants to focus on organic growth in its new markets, especially Atlanta, where the banks it bought had just one branch. "We're going to need to expand those franchises with branching as quickly as possible," he said.
Security is using the same statistical analysis tools to find the potentially most profitable locations for new branches, he said.
Mr. Collinsworth said Security has been approached by smaller banks that want to be acquired and his company has used the analysis tool to evaluate whether they fit its expansion strategy. "We are continually refining the information about our markets, and we are continually assessing and reprioritizing opportunities," he said. "We're not everywhere we wanted to be according to our original strategic analysis."
The analytical services have also helped Security's investor relations staff use market statistics to explain the company's strategy to shareholders, Mr. Collinsworth said, and to devise market-specific sales strategy.
"The very high-quality information that you get from the analyst module, relative to these micro markets around each of our branches, allows us to go in and do micro-marketing," he said. Demographic data could indicate, for example, whether a mail solicitation would be more effective than telephone calls, he said.
"It would be a total waste of money to advertise home equity loans where only 20% of your market are homeowners," Mr. Collinsworth said. "We expect a lot of our marketing will be informed by BancIntelligence."
Kevin Tweddle, the chief operating officer at BancIntelligence, said his online advisory service, a spinoff from the Atlanta consulting firm USBA Holdings Ltd., has more than 500 client institutions in 49 states, mostly with less than $10 billion of assets.
