Lead Scoring and Recommendation Algorithms
Bank J.Van Breda & C° is a specialized advisory bank focusing exclusively on entrepreneurs and liberal professionals.
Can you tell us a bit more about the project that we worked on together?
The commercial department was playing with the idea of a ‘Lead Management System’ for a few months at the time we got in contact with Faktion. The idea was that, although our account managers have a very good and profound knowledge of their customers , we were curious whether there would also be more underlying potential that we wouldn’t immediately be able to spot ourselves. For Bank van Breda this was also one of the first experiments with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, so it was a good testcase for us to see if and how our organization could benefit from this. More concrete, what we did is we handed over a big amount of data of historical sales data on which Faktion has built a recommendation engine for our account managers. The most challenging part of this project was that in essence, Bank van Breda does not sell products, we sell solutions to our customers needs. This can be achieved through selling products, but not necessarily the other way around. In our first Proof of Concept these recommendations are exposed to the sales team via a dedicated User Interface that was also developed by Faktion. The end goal however, is to integrate this into an entirely new ‘Lead Management System’ that we will be building in the coming months, together with Faktion.
What results did you obtain with the project?
A testing period of 4 weeks was organized by the Bank van Breda commercial department, with the following high-level results:
• 50+ meetings were organized based on Faktion recommendations
• 26% of these meetings made us discover the new potential that we were not aware of
• 41% of these meetings indicated even more underlying potential
• 26% of these meetings lead to a realization
The commercial team reported an 87% accuracy with regard to the recommendations that were made by the Faktion engine.
Why did you choose for Faktion?
Bank van Breda loves working with young, dynamic and flexible expert companies that are willing to go the extra mile to reach the end-goal. From the very first contact, it was clear that Faktion didn’t care about just selling the project, they cared about results and solving the need of Bank van Breda at that time. Throughout the project this was put to practice multiple times, we never had any discussion regarding in- or out-of-scope, Faktion was always willing to help us out when needed while keeping in mind the business case on both sides.
We also had multiple discussions with other vendors, including larger consultancy firms. But we can’t imagine that we would have achieved the same results in the same timeframe, with the same amount of fun and mutual respect throughout the project.
Of course, the fact that Faktion is located just a few kilometres away from our headquarters helped too.
How would you describe the collaboration with Faktion?
Flexibility and clear communication are key to making these types of projects a success, specifically for organizations like Bank van Breda, since we are mainly still learning and trying to adopt these new types of technologies within our bank. This is something we recognized in our collaboration daily. Of course, we made the necessary agreements and defined the scope before the kick-off of our project, but Faktion never hesitated to advise on a deviation from the original plan if we or themselves believed this would benefit the result.
One key-takeaway that we – as a bank – learned as well, is that not everyone is a banker, just like we are not Machine Learning Engineers. It’s the combination of these two fields of expertise that can make magic happen. A challenge we see for similar future initiatives within Bank van Breda is to help companies like Faktion also to understand what is behind the data. Starting a project with a deep-dive into the world of banking is something we should have probably done differently.
In general, we have experienced Faktion as a very result-driven, pragmatic and friendly company that makes experimenting with these new technologies even more exciting.
From the very first contact, it was clear that Faktion didn’t care about just selling the project, they cared about results and solving the need of Bank van Breda at that time.
