Staffordshire Building Society (Financial Services)

Managing a Local Branch Network in a 'Martini Banking World'

Recent months have seen new channels, new products and new players in the financial services market. If regional building societies are to defend and grow their customer base, they need to take maximum advantage of the strength of their regional branch networks as well as focus on developing their loyal local customer base.

This raises a number of questions for the Staffordshire Building Society:

	How can they make the most out of their investment in that network?
	What are the factors affecting branch performance?
	Why is one branch selling so many mortgages compared to the others?
	How can they run "what if" scenarios to assess the effect on changing the branch network configuration?

Over the last nine months, Staffordshire Building Society has been working with the Spatial Analysis team at CACI to develop a strategic network plan. This will help The Staffordshire to plan changes to the network and manage the branches in an on-going way. The project has been based on data - not only on the branches themselves, but the resources that the branches can draw on, the existing customer base, and also the market that each branch can access and the competition it faces.

CACI has developed two key models:

	A gravity model for the local market, which allows The Staffordshire to optimise the branch network based on the local demand potential
	A model that will predict business levels generated by each branch

The models have been delivered within Spatial Modeller - the new CACI tool which enables users to run "what if" scenarios to assess network changes. Using Spatial Modeller, The Staffordshire can look at how opening a new branch will effect the business of existing branches. More importantly, they were also able to develop a plan for each branch in the network indicating whether to invest, resite or leave alone.

Liz Murphy, marketing planning manager at The Staffordshire Building Society said:

"CACI are an excellent team to work with. Not only are they extremely technically skilled at building models but more importantly, they understand the world of financial services. This means that the project output is far more than statistical analysis, it is sound business recommendations."

	Financial Footprint
	Spatial Modeller