Our mission with Machias Savings Bank was to help them accomplish their goals. Machias Savings Bank has been fostering long lasting customer relationships throughout Maine since 1869. As one of the oldest and most firmly established community banks in Maine, Machias Savings Bank is successful because they are experienced professionals, committed to providing exceptional customer service while staying true to our small town community roots. Ironside has been engaged with Machias Savings Bank since June 2019, when hired to develop their data roadmap initially centered around consolidation, rationalization and planning for branch growth in several Maine communities.
Using Ironside AscentAI, a data science-as-a-service offering as well as our AscentData framework development service, we led discussions to identify business goals across Machias Saving Bank's major focus areas. One of those areas was economic viability identification and development. “Ironside is one of our business partners that has helped us establish the necessary data processes and approaches to identify economic viability in specific investment regions within Maine. As an organization, Ironside relates to us and understands that at the end of the day Machias Savings Bank is all about getting our Maine communities to a 'Yes' for growth.” – Nicole Pellenz, Machias Savings Bank Executive Vice President Chief Data Analytics & Product Officer.
For each use case, we assessed the quality of internal and external data sources as well as the signal strength of the data. After collaborating with Machias Savings Bank a prioritized list was confirmed. The two most promising projects were developed in more detail centered around using Machine Learning to identify profiles around different customer segments, define the characteristics of account economic viability, with predictions aggregated to zip codes. By looking at sums and averages of economic viability by zip codes Ironside was able to provide viable market targets to inform marketing and sales activities accurately.
After successfully building zip focused models Ironside was able provide Machias Savings Banks with insights into which data sources they needed to cleanse, combine and leverage to find their right target communities. Our model was able to deliver a ranked listing of communities based on probably that each particular zip code would be in the top 25% of economic viability measured by profitability sum, average and geographic distribution. There were many aspects of this project that Ironside was prepared and excited to deliver to Machias Savings Bank. We followed Ironside’s AscentAI approach, designed to implement ML quickly, effectively, and on a reasonable budget. We worked with the client to prioritize their use cases and goals. We were able to utilize our AWS environment along with leveraging serverless microservices-based offerings.
While there were some unique challenges, especially when considering the multiple data sources and formats due to branch acquisition, Ironside has continued to maintain flexibility and pivot as needed throughout this years-long partnership.
