One financial services player that is setting itself apart from the competition is Toronto-based CIBC, which has more than 8 million personal banking and business customers.

When it built a data warehouse eight years ago, one of the central challenges it faced was determining how to manage customers across independent lines of business: credit cards; mortgages; commercial loans; checking; mutual funds; and certificates of deposit.

Taking a customer-focused perspective, CIBC collected data across business lines and employed analytical intelligence technology to better understand and predict customer behavior. The company learned to effectively segment its customers by needs and preferences, as well as by profitability and potential. Capitalizing on its customer analysis technology from SAS, CIBC now is attaining tremendous predictability and accuracy in its marketing campaigns and customer management initiatives.

Daymond Ling, director of modeling and analytics at CIBC, points to intelligence-driven campaigns for pre-approved credit cards that are generating astounding acceptance rates of 20 to 30 percent. He also maintains that some personalized campaigns reaching out to new customers generate a 300-percent return on investment. "The benefits come from multiple sources including goodwill, which translates into strengthened relationships in the long term," he says. "In the short term, the customers see you as an institution that they're willing to trust with their financial transactions. They also purchase more products."

As a result of such successes, CIBC has become deeply committed to competing, marketing and managing customers in a very analytical way. "If a campaign is not supported by a predictive model of some sort, the business people immediately ask why," says Ling. "So we've got them trained. They have accepted the practice and they do not want to go back to the days when they didn't have models."

And while CIBC certainly has powerful analytic capabilities, it recognizes that customer insight is useless unless it is "operationalized." With that in mind, the bank's customer marketing group actively works to support sales and service operations and establish strong relationships with channel partners. "Our challenge lies in our ability to bring focused insight and stories about customer behavior to the table to enable customer-centric decision-making to happen," says Ling. "It's not about customer analysis, per se. It's about getting people used to [applying the analysis] and having them talking about customer considerations as a culture."