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Nat Commerce Touts Account Tool
National Commerce Financial Corp. says it has improved customer retention and raised its sales rates on marketing campaigns by using software to flag accounts and target customers for follow-up phone calls.
Since November the $24 billion-asset Memphis company has used Synapse Daily Deposit Manager software from Synapse Technology Inc. of Charlotte to monitor account activity.
The software analyzes individual accounts for "out-of-pattern behavior," such as a balance decrease or the discontinuation of a direct deposit, said John G. Stallings, an executive vice president and the director of retail banking at National Commerce. Accounts where such behavior occurs are flagged for phone calls by local branch managers.
"We have seen a higher level of retention among those households where we worked those alerts," Mr. Stallings said.
A report in May, which was based on data gathered from mid-November through March, said the retention rate for customers who were flagged and received follow-up calls was 94%, versus 91% for a control group that did not receive such calls, he said.
The rate has improved further since then, Mr. Stallings said. "It gets better every month," he said, because the software has "more history to work with."
National Commerce began a "best practices" project two years ago to improve its efforts to acquire, build, and retain customer relationships, he said.
Research confirmed that National Commerce customers who used a handful of key products and services - including debit cards, overdraft protection, Internet banking and bill payment, and automated clearing house payments such as direct deposit - had higher retention and profitability, the company said.
"They're more likely to remain customers," Mr. Stallings said. "We knew that to be the case, just from looking at it at an anecdotal level."
The bank is using the software to follow up on leads from its direct marketing campaigns, he said. "We find there's a higher level of success where there's a follow-up phone call."
Synapse and National Commerce are enhancing the software so it can monitor all of a household's various accounts; that capability should be available this month, Mr. Stallings said. The closing of any of a household's accounts should ring an alarm, he said.
SunTrust Banks Inc.'s purchase of National Commerce is expected to close next quarter. Mr. Stallings said he does not know whether SunTrust would use the software after the deal. "That's one of those areas that's being discussed," he said.
Group: Phishing Up 24% in June
Online account theft is growing rapidly, and thieves are focusing more on banks, according to the Anti-Phishing Working Group.
Three of the top five targets in June were banks - Citibank, U.S. Bank, and Fleet. Citi was hit with 492 attacks (up 33% from May), U.S. Bank with 251 (up 50%), and Fleet with 55 (up 67%), according to the group's records.
In all, 1,422 scams were reported to the group, 24% more than in May, it said Wednesday. Its members are banks, vendors, and law enforcement agencies.
Though financial institutions as a group have always been the most popular targets for such scams, other major companies, including eBay Inc. of San Jose and America Online Inc. of Dulles, Va., have been prominent targets. eBay was the most-impersonated company from December until April, when Citi rocketed past it.
The group, which was created by Tumbleweed Communications Corp. of Redwood City, Calif., monitors monthly trends in "phishing," a type of theft in which criminals solicit personal information by sending bogus e-mails that purport to be from a company where the victim may have an account.
eBay is popular with phishers because its customers all have feedback scores, which show their credibility, according to the group. A criminal who steals the account of a credible eBay seller can scam many trusting bidders, the group says.
Phishing attacks involving eBay dropped 3% in June, to 285. Only four sites have been the target of more than 100 attacks in any month since the group started tracking scams in December. (The other sites belonged to Citi, U.S. Bancorp of Minneapolis, and eBay's PayPal Inc.)
America Online impersonations dropped 17%, to 14, and Visa U.S.A. scams dropped 57%, to nine.
Typically, phishing e-mails leads victims to Web sites that resemble legitimate account log-in sites. When a victim types in a username and password, the information is sent to the con artists and can be used to drain an account or apply for credit. Daniel Wolfe
