For BMO Bank of Montreal, the Mosaik MasterCard represented a dramatic early step in the financial group’s transformation to a truly “customer-centric” organization.

The theory was great: Starting with a plain vanilla credit card, customers would select from a menu of features, choosing from a variety of card designs, reward programs, interest rates and travel protection plans. The objective: to migrate every BMO Bank of Montreal MasterCard holder to the Mosaik card and attract new customers, while increasing assets and enhancing loyalty.

To be successful, the innovative modular credit card program demanded a dramatic transformation of the bank’s marketing. Instead of product-focused campaigns developed over months, the new strategy required continuous marketing of product offerings through a variety of channels – statements, direct mail, telemarketing, direct- response TV, Web, e-mail, call center and IVR.

Some communications encouraged customers to change options as their needs evolved; others offered special rates and balance transfers to invigorate sluggish accounts and invite new ones. “We were saying, ‘you tell us what the product is,’” says Robin Stewart, manager of retail customer development for BMO Bank of Montreal MasterCard. “The result: hundreds, if not thousands, of combinations; and we wanted to be sure the right offer went to the right customer at the right time.”

BMO Bank of Montreal required an infrastructure that would organize that mass of messages and create a consistent customer experience, Stewart says.

The bank selected Affinium Campaign, a cross-channel campaign and interaction management application from Waltham, Mass.-based Unica Corp.

This application defines, creates, tests, executes and analyzes all marketing programs that use e-mail, direct mail, call centers and the Web. It mapped the bank’s customers from existing credit cards with bundled features to the right set of new card options. Using probability market basket models, targeted feature recommendations were designed for each customer and prospect. Using customer segmentation schemes and finance models helped ensure that each communication or message and card recommendation was relevant both to the customer and to the bank.

Affinium helped the bank surpass desired results, beating the planned acquisition rate for new customers by 3.5%. “More than a third of new customers accepted up-sell offers during card activation, immediately increasing both share of wallet and loyalty,” says Kelly Fiedler, Unica’s director of solutions and customer marketing.

The bank’s average time to design and build a multi-channel campaign was reduced from weeks to days.

Unica’s solution, which has attracted companies in numerous industries such as electronics retailers, direct merchants and newspapers, worked for the bank. Affinium’s ability to provide seamless access to data in multiple systems, complex customer segmentation techniques and a system design clearly geared toward marketers rather than programmers, was particularly appealing.

“Most direct marketing solutions are driven around programming,” Stewart says. “Where others saw a technical challenge, Unica understood it was a business challenge. They understood direct marketing as a practice, a concept, and a philosophy, and that’s what we bought into.”

BMO Bank of Montreal has redesigned its entire process, streamlining more than 50 distinct campaigns into one, thereby increasing the effectiveness of its communications.