Lead Machine

The corporate lending business is an important pillar of the development bank BayernLB (Bayerische Landesbank). An efficient lending process plays a central role in increasing its own competitiveness. A data-driven acquisition process is also part of the further development of its own market position.

Every day, BayernLB's sales staff gather information on the economic development of existing and potential new customers in order to identify business opportunities and risks at an early stage. Are there any forthcoming mergers? Are there changes in management? Are investment opportunities opening up for companies, for example as a result of economic policy decisions?

In the past, BayernLB employees used to manually research such potential triggers for proactive sales activities. The monitoring and evaluation of various news sources was extremely time-consuming. The use of tools such as Google Alerts provided little relief due to the high number of false positives.

BayernLB and its digitalisation partner adesso are working together to introduce Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in the bank's specialist departments. In implementing the AI Strategy Framework, the project participants identified the automation of the research process as an ideal starting point for making BayernLB's proactive sales more efficient and targeted.

adesso's GenAI experts developed the 'Lead Machine' application for the bank. Its task is to automatically search all connected news sources for sales-relevant information. To do this, it evaluates news titles once a day using predefined keywords. If there is a match, the content of the articles is cached, transferred to a template with a predefined prompt and passed to a self-learning OpenAI GPT model. The language model fully analyses the news articles, classifies them and extracts all relevant information. Finally, the 'lead machine' creates summaries from the extracted content, records them in the form of CRM entries and assigns them to the responsible customer advisors.

The adesso team integrated the lead machine directly into BayernLB's existing Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Dynamics system landscape. The frontend is based on Microsoft PowerApps. The backend developed by adesso in parallel ensures the connection to Google News Search and also includes the website crawler, the defined prompts, the connection to the GPT model and the database. The developers implemented the functionalities and the data exchange using flows in Microsoft Power Automate.

The 'Lead Machine' application significantly reduces the effort required to research sales opportunities and monitor risks. The automated search and extraction of relevant customer information from news articles has several benefits for employees. Reviewing content via clearly assigned tickets in the CRM is quick and easy, allowing employees to focus more on their core competencies. On the other hand, the application increases the quality and quantity of evaluations. Every month, more than 100 new sales leads are entered into BayernLB's CRM via the 'lead machine'. It thus makes a reliable and significant contribution to generating leads and revenue potential.