Who’s Your Targeted Customer?

Contactless cards, mobile banking, personal financial management software, FaceBook applications. All of these can be great for the financial services industry and a lot of people are trying to figure out the best way to leverage them. The question is, who are you providing these services for?

Have you actually sat down and had a group session discussing your plans for these new services? Or is it more like a 3 year old, wanting what big brother (competition) has? There seems to be a lot of “me-too-ism”, mostly because of fear. “If the big boys have it, we have to get it also in order to compete.”

Whether that is true is open for discussion, but if you do decide to follow the leader, do you have a plan? As an example, let’s take mobile banking. Most FIs fall into one of two categories: 1. Let’s be a first mover in the market or; 2. Let’s see what problems the first movers have and which channel (SMS, WAP, client app) wins out.

The biggest problem for adoption that I see is, no one is talking about how to market this new service. Yes, statistics show that 99% of people in the world have a mobile phone. Yes, even your grandmother knows how to “txt her bff”. Yes, Asia, Europe, and Africa have mobile payments, which is growing daily by leaps and bounds.

But for some reason, I don’t think your customers really care about the statistics. Better yet, do you have any idea what your customer wants? A couple of weeks ago, I overheard two couples talking about our bank and one was trying to access our online banking on his Blackberry. When I finished my meal, I went over and introduced myself. I told them that we were looking at mobile banking and explained a little of it to them. When I finished, I asked if it was something they would be interested in. Both couples said yes and the one with the Blackberry said we could sign him up ASAP.

We’ve also done a survey with our retail and commercial online banking customers. The responses matched up with what consultants, such as Javelin, have been saying. However, it all boils down to how we offer this service.

Honestly, I don’t think most of our older customers would be interested in mobile banking. Unfortunately, we also have an older customer base. But if we marketed mobile banking to the younger crowd, we could bring in brand new customers. Since we have a few local colleges in the area, I think that’s a good plan. This age group also “lives” on their cell phone and would most likely be open to “on-the-go” services.

We’re all trying to grow our customer base. But instead of buying new technology and just fitting it into your current customer base, think about how it can benefit you in other ways. Before you just add that new service all willy-nilly, you need to have a plan. As the saying goes, “Those that fail to plan…”