BCG Acquires Formation to Expand Its Personalization Offering and AI Software Development Capabilities

BOSTON—Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Formation today announced an agreement by which BCG will acquire Formation, the leader in artificial intelligence based dynamic offer optimization and personalization. With the acquisition of San Francisco-based Formation, BCG builds on its significant investments in AI-enabled software.

“Our clients are increasingly focused on AI investments that create sustainable shareholder value for their businesses,” said Sylvain Duranton, a BCG managing director and senior partner, and global leader of BCG X, BCG’s new tech-build and design business unit. “With this acquisition, we are expanding our ability to deliver technology that increases customer lifetime value for our clients and the speed at which we can develop cutting-edge software at BCG.”

Formation, which in 2015 was spun off from BCG Digital Ventures, BCG’s corporate innovation and digital business building arm, and which has been majority owned by BCG since, built the world’s leading dynamic offer platform, enabling brands to send millions of one-to-one offers using AI and machine learning. Since then, Formation has driven over $2 billion in incremental revenue for leading enterprises in the QSR, retail, and travel industries. Formation's patented platform enables organizations to leverage their first-party customer data to generate offers that are individualized, tracked, measured, and optimized with machine learning.

“Being part of the BCG family gives us an incredible opportunity to scale our long-term vision of making commerce personal,” said Christian Selchau-Hansen, co-founder and CEO of Formation. “Together, BCG and Formation will accelerate the digital transformation of leading brands by unlocking the power of their data to engage their customers at a personal level.”

The addition of Formation’s technology and engineering capabilities to BCG's strengths will add significant capabilities to how it develops software for leading brands around the world. Formation’s deep gamification expertise and user-friendly personalization product capabilities will support the acceleration of BCG Fabriq, which enables enterprises to connect data and create personalized one-to-one experiences across the customer journey.

Media Contact:
Eric Gregoire:
+1 617 850 3783
gregoire.eric@bcg.com

About Formation

Formation helps brands build deeper relationships with every customer, beyond the transaction. Our patented Dynamic Offer Platform leverages brands’ first-party data to automatically generate each customer’s offer with the best action and reward, then manages the deployment, measurement and fulfillment of each offer across the marketing stack. Brands see 3X revenue lift, 2X more engagement and 10X faster time to market with their offers. For more information, visit formation.ai.

About Boston Consulting Group

Boston Consulting Group partners with leaders in business and society to tackle their most important challenges and capture their greatest opportunities. BCG was the pioneer in business strategy when it was founded in 1963. Today, we work closely with clients to embrace a transformational approach aimed at benefiting all stakeholders—empowering organizations to grow, build sustainable competitive advantage, and drive positive societal impact.
 
Our diverse, global teams bring deep industry and functional expertise and a range of perspectives that question the status quo and spark change. BCG delivers solutions through leading-edge management consulting, technology and design, and corporate and digital ventures. We work in a uniquely collaborative model across the firm and throughout all levels of the client organization, fueled by the goal of helping our clients thrive and enabling them to make the world a better place.