The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is to consolidate data from more than 1,500 sources to give sales staff a single view of customer information.

The bespoke tool will be a single port of call to establish which banking services a customer uses, their behaviour patterns and credit risk.

The system will allow employees to identify what products can be cross-sold to customers, says RBS head of performance analytics David Samson.

‘The retail banking market is saturated and this could help us increase our market share,’ said Samson. ‘Having all the data available also prevents mis-selling, such as offering a credit card to someone with debt issues.’

RBS has more than 15 million domestic customers, 1.2 million of which are businesses.

The bank already uses business intelligence software from SAS, which collects information from various sources, including branch transactions and cash machines.

‘The wealth of information we are able to capture and analyse is significant and we already have that data in the back office,’ said Samson. ‘We just needed to improve how we manage it because it was taking sales staff a long time to look it all up.’

RBS developed the iPal tool in four weeks and plans to roll it out to nearly 6,000 sales staff. It may also be extended to international branches.

A single view of customer data is the Holy Grail for most businesses with such large numbers of clients, says Butler Group analyst Mark Blowers.

‘RBS is a particularly large organisation grappling with massive volumes of data, so having this kind of visibility is crucial,’ he said. ‘The banking industry is very competitive and being able to use its information to cross-sell could give the firm that necessary edge over rivals.’