Young People Disloyal To Banks? or Just In General

So its official, Young people have no loyalty?
The Wise Marketer reports on the Claritas 2006 market audit’s results, which (broken down by age) showed that 12.6% of the so-called Generation Y (under 30 years old) households said they had no primary banking institution. Other age groups, such as Generation X (age 30-39) came out at 11.4% while Seniors (70+ years old) came out at 11.1%, Baby Boomers (aged 40-59) came out at 10.4%, and Empty-Nesters (aged 60-69) came out at 8.6%. It is interesting to consider this piece of research the day after Vanson Bourne for Irish IT firm CA, found that 60% of Irish people now solely dealt with their bank on-line, and 30% dealt solely with their credit card company on-line. They find it more convienent, and less costly than calling a 1850 number were contributing factors, as was the fact that:

A worryingly low 8 percent of people found getting information from call centres on additional products and services a snap. Meanwhile, 69 percent of people have been asked to call back because the (in this example, telecom providers) provider systems have been slow or have gone down. With more than half of consumers willing to jump ship to telecoms rivals for bad service, companies would do well to keep an eye on the quality of customer service.

I think the on-line environment is a ripe space for customer migration. Once customers can compare and migrate with little or no barriers, you as a company are competing on the quality of your customer data, what you do with it, and how you use it to invite customers into conversations.

Technorati technorati tags: , , , , ,

Financial Services Fraud: $6,383 Average Loss Per Person

Ken Elefant over at VentureBeat makes some interesting points about credit fraud. Yes, it costs $49.3bn and $6,383 average cost per customer. But most of the “solutions” are based on data analytics and data aggregation.

The solutions they offer are typically client-server based, requiring months or even years of installation and training

. And what are banks doing according to Ken?

The reality is that banks have a hard time telling if the individual in question was a fraudster or simply someone who wouldn’t or couldn’t pay their bills. It takes work to figure it out, with the effort traditionally performed by fraud analysts working the phones to try to solve it. It’s a costly approach that hasn’t scaled well as identity fraud losses have risen in recent years.

As is the way with Blog conversations, one of the comments to that VentureBeat post is very interesting. A guy called Tom Fragala of www.myTrustOn.com quotes a Javelin study on customer attitudes to Fraud, and guess what, the customer sees it as their problem! In my books this means that if companies give the customer the option of adopting a fraud prevention option, they will usually buy into it. With nearly 100% of consumers carrying mobile phones, surely their is a process that can be deployed that could call a customer to ask them to validate a transaction? I don’t think I would be giving the game away if I said that VoiceSage were talking to a number of financial sevice organisations about this very issue.

Technorati technorati tags: , , , , ,

Credit Card Overdue Fees worth £500 in the UK

The Banking Business Review has an interesting piece on the approaching problem of credit management in the retail sector. Noting that the card sector, overdrafts and mortgages have become the latest products to be scrutinized by regulators with respect to excessive fees, the regulators are clamping down on excessive fees which will undoubtedly be a huge issue for retail lenders.

“Indeed, they are likely to lose a significant source of revenue. For instance, over limit and late payment fees accounted for an estimated 11.5% of total credit card industry revenues in 2005. Furthermore, the enforced reduction in default fees will cost the credit card industry an estimated GBP524 million in lost revenue”.

Given that these companies may no longer financially benefit from letting customers run up these fees, it is probably going to become even more important that outstanding credit is collected efficiently.

Technorati technorati tags: , , , , ,

A Story About A Credit Card, A Tailor, and A Bank

Here at VoiceSage we think about how, when and where people would like to be “interrupted”, and what they would want to do “in that particular context”. The thing is that every customer company relationship has its own context, and every person will have different psychological thresholds. In a way, how we interrupt our customers is a corollary of how much attention they want to give us. Let me illustrate with a personal experience.

I was in Abraham’s tailors (Little Ann Street, Dublin) and having had a wonderful buying experience I hand over my credit card. As I’ve said before I think the “checkout” experience is key to entire purchasing process. Well, the card was stopped and the staff member was advised by the machine to have the customer call the bank in question. “Perhaps” my tailor advised “you have run over the limit?”. “Not likely” I replied, “I have acres of space on the card”. My tailor handed me the land line, and we called the bank. The bank did not deal with the query and handed me over to credit card services, who in turn told me to go to the local bank branch IN PERSON and sort this out. Wow, I said. I work in this kind of business and this is a horror. “No problem said the Taylor. I will hold the suit for you”.

I go to the bank THE NEXT DAY and they say, hey no problem with the card. “You were just making an unusual purchase, and they stopped the card” (because I was in Dublin, not Limerick). I think I looked at the bank official for a few minutes waiting to see what they were going to do to ensure that this situation would never happen again. No such luck.

First, there is no reason why when an account is triggered as a potential fraud alert that a call cannot be initiated to that person’s known mobile, a pin number requested, a transaction legitimised, and a confirmation received, all in the one phone call and with no other need for human interaction. Secondly, an automated call asking for verification could have increased my confidence in my credit card company; Thirdly, I could be a “highly risk averse person” who very much appreciates these kinds of alerts and interrupts.

Technorati technorati tags: , , , , ,