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Abstract
Low interest rates and sluggish economic growth are not exactly ideal conditions for the financial services industry. Almost daily we are confronted with reports of inadequate capital bases, declining earnings, and layoffs at banks. But while many traditional retail banks are struggling with a business downturn, the direct bank market is enjoying steady and respectable growth despite a challenging environment. Dr. Schmidberger, Fully Authorized Representative at ING-DiBa Germany, offers us a glimpse behind the curtains of this direct bank. We will learn how data technology is used so that bank customers are (more) satisfied.

Abstract
Increasing global digitalization brings huge amounts of data. Finding a successful way to handle all this data and to transform it into real insights will be a critical success factor in the future. The biggest challenge for data science applications in marketing is that many marketing people studied marketing because they no longer wanted to do mathematics. A good marketing campaign will still have to be creative, touch emotions and build a brand, but more and more marketing managers will also need technical and analytical skills. It will more than ever be necessary to determine real causal effects to pull the right levers. Consumer insights have always been considered a major driver for growth, but in the digital world, successful growth can also come from improved technical and analytical implementation and skillful application of new tools and methods.

Abstract
Telecommunications companies traditionally offer several tariffs from which their customers can choose the tariff that best suits their preferences. Yet, customers sometimes make choices that are not optimal for them because they do not minimize their bill for a certain usage amount. We show in this paper that companies should be very concerned about choices in which customers pick tariffs that are too small for them because they lead to a significant increase in customers churn. In contrast, this is not the case if customers choose tariffs that are too big for them. The reason is that in particular flat-rates provide customers with the additional benefit that they guarantee a constant bill amount that consumption can be enjoyed more freely because all costs are already accounted for.

The sales territory alignment problem deals with the question of how to align a number of sales coverage units (usually zip-codes or political districts) to sales territories. These sales territories are usually aligned in a way that they are almost balanced relative to one or several attributes like, e.g. potential or work-load. To support this task of the sales manager, a number of models have been proposed. Nevertheless, all of these models suffer from one of the following shortcomings: either, they do not guarantee the values of the chosen balancing attributes to be within certain lower and upper bounds, or the specification of these lower and upper bounds is left to the sales manager. Therefore, we propose a model called EQUALIZER that avoids these shortcomings by determining almost balanced territories without requiring lower and upper bounds from the sales manager and furthermore ensuring contiguous sales territories. In order to motivate EQUALIZER, we compare different models on a small set of instances.