>>LEDWITH: Hi …
So tough acts to follow all around and a lot of the same staff they talked about with employers
and employees applies to what we are doing, focus on retail banking and with consumers.
So what is FLIP?
We started here at London Business School entrepreneur summer program.
What we are doing is actually building a digital retail bank from the ground up which is kind
of a difficult thing to do with retail banking, but it all started here and so, what we did
is actually analysed a lot of trends that have come out across financial services and
technology.
This is where the idea started.
What did we find?
We found that banking customers are increasingly dissatisfied, which is not really surprising
given the financial crisis.
The other thing we found is that finance and mobile are converging, makes a lot of sense
when we are having conversations with telecommunications companies because they see this as well.
For us we actually realized on our own survey that sixty percent of customers visit a branch
only a few times a year, versus eighty percent use digital online tools.
Massive change in behaviour for banking and a massive opportunity for us.
So what we actually are doing is building a digital retail bank from the ground up for
today's mobile and social consumers.
If you do it this way, since then this is the name FLIP, you take things in a very different
direction.
What does this mean for our consumers and who are our customers?
So the social consumer is a very different breed of consumer.
These people you know just like Costas talked about are very interactive.
They talk with each other, they talk with their networks, they talk with their friends,
and they look for recommendations even from strangers.
And so the paradigm for us is essentially shift it.
How do we get to these people, how do we talk to these people?
What happens then is that they make their own decisions, but they make the decisions
through their network.
And so instead of engaging with each individual customer, we actually have to engage the entire
network, so that people share and talk about what we are doing ultimately to get them to
come on board.
What this actually implies then is that the way traditional targeting, traditional marketing
works is no longer really valid and it is certainly no longer efficient.
Demographic and financial status are primarily used, we used to use and financial services
and most companies still do, to try to segment consumers.
So you would take some sort of measure of wealth and some sort of measure age and you
would then segment out across that and you come up with a nice grid.
And then the way banking typically works is you would then take your product set and figure
out who is going buy each of your products and try to market to those little clusters.
For us that is not really effective and it's not very efficient, because we know that these
people are all talking to one another.
So what we do?
We actually focused on behavioural targeting.
There is a lot of this happening now because, not so much in banking because our systems
are set up to capture the data, but if you build the systems to capture the data and
use the data, you can actually target, retarget and then use your own customers to then spread
your message at a much lower cost and that is much more efficient for us to actually
get to these people.
The best practices that we are sort of finding as we are building this, the first is critical.
You have to measure engagement, not impressions.
Financial services institutions are probably the worst at this, because they tend to look
at the wrong metrics, I think.
The one that they focus on his impressions and so you do is you would send out and ad
to the stratosphere, however you do it and then you look at how many people look at your
ad.
For us that doesn't really mean anything.
Because yeah, people looking at the ad is good, but are the interacting with us?
Are they engaging with us?
Are they actually pulling the trigger and changing their bank account or opening an
additional account with us?
That is very hard to measure, if you do it in the traditional way.
And so, you have to focus on an engagement metric.
For us, it means interacting with others last message.
Again, consumers have changed right, the market has changed.
The way that you reach these people has changed and it is continuing to evolve and so you
have to be prepared to instead of just blasting a message out to the market, you have to actually
interact with them.
That means in a playful way that means in a responsive way that means just like us we
talked about the lack of attention, right.
We have to focus then on how do we engage these people on a conversation?
And how do we then take that conversation and do something interesting with it.
A lot of what we are doing, we have to focus on the strengths of our marketing partners.
That means that my strategy on Twitter is much different than my strategy with LinkedIn.
Because the way they segment their own clients and the way that they reach their networks
is very different.
But it also means that I have the ability with a company like Twitter, to what is called
micro target.
So I can actually define age, how often you open the app, what device you use, where you
are geographically located.
I have a lot of data that I can use to then segment our marketing plan and actually measure
that interaction.
So it becomes not about impressions but it comes a lot more about how much response rate
did we get.
For us it means building creative incentives into the operational structure.
It means you can actually build marketing in a way detecting encompassed into the operations
of the organization.
With banking what we are doing is actually building a random incentives program so that
you got to buy a cup a coffee and the bank at random, to you not us, will actually pick
up a cup of coffee.
Immediately as soon as you swipe your card or do your thumb print or do NFC, whatever
it is, your phone will buzz and it will say “hey this one is on us”.
So you focus on social interactions because then when your phone buzzes and you are with
a group of friends having coffee or a pint, then your phone buzzes … what do you do?
Immediately, hey guys’ check this out … look … the bank just bought me a beer!
We can do that though.
We have the ability to do it.
The technology is there to do it, but it changes the way you build the entire structure of
the organization.
For us the biggest this comes down to, then you have to remain our job.
Because today's trends are just that trends.
So what is going to happen is these continue to evolve.
We have to be aware of things like mobile technology changing, we have to be aware of
device, we have to be device agnostic for us and we have to be ready for things like
wearable technology, Near Field Communication, micro geo-targeting.
All of these stuff.
So you cannot build a static organization and a static IT infrastructure and expect
to be able to adjust to things like this.
So that is what is changing for us.