Enhancing bank direct marketing through data mining

Abstract

The financial crisiscreated pressure on banksdue to credit restriction, increasing competition for deposits retention and demanding efficiency improvements of direct marketing campaigns. Our research conducted a data mining project on direct marketing campaigns for depositssubscriptionsby using recent data of a Portuguese retail bank. We used the Support Vector Machine (SVM) data mining technique for modeling and evaluated it through a sensitive analysis. The findings revealed previously unknown valuable knowledge, such as the best months for campaigns to occur, and optimal call duration. Such knowledge can be used to improve campaign efficiency.