• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, May 5, 2010

FinScore consultants believe they have created a successful method to integrate offline and online date to target consumers on specific sites. The application began as a pilot project for a telecommunications company in Switzerland.

Scheduled for public release within the next few weeks, the platform dubbed FinWEB combines and matches customer offline CRM data with their online behavior to create what Sandro Saitta, a consultant at FinScore S.A., calls an "extended profile."

Today SAS supports the platform, but in the future the FinWEB will work with other databases, whatever the client requests. The idea is to mine the Web site data and CRM data to make predictions on future purchases, as well as recommendations of ads, products and content that serve up to customers while they're on the telco's Web site. FinWEB doesn't follow people across the Web.

The platform identifies the browser's IP address, which represents the consumer, and maps the online behavioral pattern information to data in the customer's CRM file. Each household gets a unique customer number to track phone calls, price paid for subscriptions, how often the customer comes to the Web site, the amount of time they remain on the Web site, and more. Clicks on ads get counted. But when consumers don't click on the ads, the data helps to determine why not.

After realizing the importance of merging data in warehouses with online stats, it took a little more than a year to develop the platform, taking privacy concerns into consideration. The telco wanted to ensure the platform didn't release customer data to third-party companies. FinScore solved that by using encrypted customer numbers.

Categorizing Web pages to aggregate Web log data proved challenging, too, because the telco wanted to record each move consumers made on its Web site, along with the number of times users visit a page. Saitta says engineers had to map URLs to categories. It was important to make a well-thought-out map to accurately calculate targeting.

Switzerland-based FinScore's list of clients includes ING, Barclays, UBS, T Systems, among others mostly in that country. FinScore, however, has a plan to work with clients in the United States. The company says it can install the software and train clients to use on their own, providing the platform as a Software as a Service (SaaS) The idea is to start the client off supported by SaaS, and then move to the company on-site, if desired.