Award-winning bank’s data-driven strategy boosts productivity, efficiency and customer centricity

An ‘analytics for all’ approach helps Banca Intesa Beograd foster informed decision making, innovation and sustainable growth

Banca Intesa has earned multiple bank-of-the-year awards in Serbia handed out by renowned international magazines such as The Banker, Euromoney and Global Finance. The Serbian bank’s strong financial performance and product and service excellence have made it an industry leader. But it’s the data-driven culture in customer service that helps push it to and keep it at the forefront. That culture enables Banca Intesa to constantly improve and innovate based on new technologies, as well as fosters a focus on empowering both customers and employees.

The bank has implemented an interactive, visual dashboard enabled by SAS Visual Analytics on SAS Viya. The dashboard displays more than 80 reports for the bank’s retail segments and a report specifically designed to allow the bank’s 1,600 employees to monitor their performance achievements and progress. The monthly access numbers tell the story of the project’s success – 1,400 distinct users opened nearly 200 distinct reports and created almost 60,000 logs, increasing efficiency, effectiveness and productivity while improving overall understanding of the data.

We sat down with Zoran Šiljković, Head of Commercial Planning and Reporting at Banca Intesa Beograd, the Serbian unit of Italy’s Intesa Sanpaolo, to hear more about the bank’s data-driven strategy, new dashboard and plans for the future.

Banca Intesa Beograd has been leading the Serbian banking market for close to 20 years. Would you say your data centricity and technological savvy have a role in this achievement?

Šiljković: Our long-term success, particularly our ability to adapt to changing market conditions and support customer needs, can be attributed to three key pillars: First, we are using innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning based on data to simplify processes and improve security and customer services. Second, we are creating a corporate culture where decisions are based on data analytics. This enables us to make more accurate predictions, identify opportunities and reduce risks. Third, we are constantly investing in our people, current and talents through the consistent strengthening of skills and competencies. Motivating our employees to learn data analysis guarantees that Banca Intesa Beograd continues as the leader in industry developments.

What role does analytics play in innovation and data culture at the bank?

Šiljković: Analytics enables us to make strategic but also operative and tactical decisions and optimize processes to better understand customer behavior, provide personalized offers, and more effectively meet customers’ expectations and needs.

We have been using SAS technologies – including SAS^® Enterprise Guide^®, SAS^® Enterprise Miner™, SAS^® Data Integration Studio and SAS^® Visual Analytics – for more than a decade. During this time, we have been able to grow, innovate and form deeper connections with our customers through better insights.

How are you using SAS Viya? Can you share some recent SAS Visual Analytics use cases?

Šiljković: The retail dashboard is an interactive report viewer using SAS Visual Analytics on SAS Viya. This ‘mega repository’ contains more than 80 reports for various segments, including mass market, retail banking, small business, transactional and pricing.

Within this super dashboard, there are also two recent entries: One Executive Page, created to simplify and optimize report creation by top executives and senior managers; and Performance and KPI Scheme, designed for employees to check their performance and productivity even on a daily level, thereby optimizing the process of reward systems and the whole performance management system. This is a very important tool for guiding and cascading strategic goals to the whole retail network and translating objectives on an institutional level into actionable, measurable, transparently displayed KPIs [key performance indicators].

What requirements drove the One Executive Page project, and what were the benefits of SAS technology?

Šiljković: Our senior leadership needed more effective, real-time reporting. It needed to be easy to access and understand, with succinct details to reduce decision-making time.

Initially, we worked on data accuracy. Streamlining the data needed for decision making requires the data to be integral, consistent, high-quality and reliable. Thanks to SAS, we can ensure data accuracy and automate the creation and distribution of reports, which can be accessed in real time and via mobile devices. Our top management especially likes to view One Executive Page on their tablets, but also to approach other reports.

The initial idea was to create a single-page report of strategic data, hence the name One Executive Page. In reality, the report is interactive and, with the SAS Visual Analytics component, accessible in multiple formats – tables, graphs, descriptions, etc. The manager decides whether to constrain the report to a single page or deepen certain data and insights with additional views.

Why did you also choose SAS Viya for your Performance and KPI Scheme calculation dashboard? What are the advantages?

Šiljković: The Performance and KPI Scheme is used by nearly 1,400 employees. It is very simple and intuitive – no IT knowledge is needed to use the dashboard.

Many companies do quarterly reports. For us, though, it’s an incredible opportunity to have the data in real time so employees can understand how they are performing and decide what, where and how to improve their performance, supported by their managers. The system allows employees to check their incentive calculations, so they are incentivized to improve their KPIs, on which the whole performance management process and appraisal are based.

We chose SAS Visual Analytics on SAS Viya for the advanced analytics capabilities, scalability and flexibility. It is undeniable that SAS Visual Analytics is the pillar that accelerated a real democratization of analytics in the bank.

The One Executive Page and the Performance and KPI Scheme provide full visualization and granularity by branches, products and channels. They are excellent because they enable business users who don’t have previous IT knowledge to work with data.

How will AI affect the future of analytics? Are you already making plans for new horizons?

Šiljković: New technologies facilitate modern business, so changes are necessary to sustain future business activities. To successfully continue to apply AI in analytics, we must further strengthen the flexibility of our corporate culture and data management system efficiency. Besides institutions, clients are also adopting new technologies. In our bank, more than 650,000 of our digitalized clients have adjusted and accepted new technologies and make everyday transactions via mobile phones.

The integration of AI opens many new opportunities to achieve success and innovation. We are always exploring new horizons and making plans to discover new technologies for creating strategic advantage that will, in years to come, keep us at the top of the Serbian banking system.