NCR and Quadstone Launch International Alliance
ACTION ITEMS
NCR Corporation and Quadstone Limited have launched a strategic partnership to drive more effective customer relationships.
The new alliance is led by NCR's Financial Solutions Group, based in London, and centres on Quadstone's unique customer behaviour modelling software products.
These products - Decisionhouse and Transactionhouse - are an integral part of NCR's Customer Management Solutions to enable its clients to turn their detailed customer and transaction data into an in-depth understanding of the way consumers behave.
This understanding leads to predictions of how customers will behave in the future, which then helps large organisations improve their own profitability by offering products and services most in tune with customer desires.
The new Quadstone-NCR Co-operative Marketing Agreement defines how the two organisations will collaborate in the international marketplace. It covers key areas such as marketing plans, trade shows, and training, as well as providing a new impetus for joint and direct sales activity in Europe, United States and Canada.
The new agreement is a further extension of the existing NCR-Quadstone partnership that centres on the use of Decisionhouse to help financial institutions better model and anticipate consumer behaviour.
"NCR can help our customers get fast analysis of their entire customer base, delivered across the whole organisation, whenever and wherever it is needed," said Gordon Ferris, NCR's vice president for Customer Management Solutions. "By having the right knowledge about what a consumer is likely to be interested in, a financial, retail or other customer-led organisation can be proactive in its approach to them and so gain the edge on the competition."
The benefits offered by NCR's partnership with Quadstone are already in evidence at Barclays, one of the world's top 20 banks. "The ability to manipulate data easily, as provided by NCR's data warehousing solutions, and being able to use powerful analysis tools, as provided by Quadstone's Decisionhouse, are key components of our drive to market the right products at the right time to the right people. It also ensures we get the right balance between risk and reward," said David Townsend, Director of Credit Risk Portfolio Management, Barclays Bank.
"Predictive models need to distil complex and large sets of data into a form that business users can understand and make use of," said Neil Heywood, Managing Director of Quadstone. "Speed and flexibility in building these models is critical to maintaining a competitive edge. Our partnership with NCR achieves this by bringing together world-class consultants, our Decisionhouse customer modelling software, and the data warehouse itself."
Quadstone's success with high profile clients such as C&A, Telecom Service Centres, Barclays, J.Sainsbury's and Liverpool Victoria in Europe has already provided a springboard into the US and other overseas markets.
About NCR Corporation
NCR Corporation is in the business of transforming transactions into relationships. NCR is a recognised world leader in data warehousing solutions, ATMs, point-of-sale, high performance scanners, and support services for retail, financial and national accounts markets.
NCR's business solutions are built on the foundation of the company's long-established industry knowledge and consulting expertise, value-adding software, global customer support services, a complete line of consumable and media products, and world-leading hardware technology. More information about NCR and its products may be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.ncr.com.
Quadstone Limited
Quadstone specialises in the development of software for customer behaviour modelling for the world's largest consumer-facing companies. Established in 1994, Quadstone's turnover for 1997/98 exceeded £3million.
Quadstone currently employs over 70 staff in its Edinburgh headquarters, and has supporting offices in London and Boston. The company is currently initiating a number of international service-oriented partnerships with complementary companies in the USA, Europe and Japan. These partnerships are the source of major expansion for Quadstone's products in 1999.