Bob Bayman: Guest speaker at The London School of Retail Banking.

“Bob always gives a fresh and controversial perspective on bank branding and the view of the customer experience” was the introduction.

Yesterday it was a pleasure to present to the London School of Retail Banking at the Marriott County Hall. “Transactions, Loyalty and Love” was the title of my discussion.

It’s always good to attend these international banking events and meet banks from around the World, though it is remarkable how the issues are always remarkably similar.

• The sector is as important as ever to shareholders, customers and governments.
• It is more transactional than ever and remains poorly branded, globally. With brands key differentiators their size or their colour.
• There is a clear acceptance that banking customers are not well served.
• That low customer satisfaction levels continue to be the norm.
• That rebranding or re-badging is expensive, superficial in its objectives and has little affect on the customer’s view.
• That one or two bright shoots are beginning to push out through the ground.

We talked about inertia and the recently announced drop in trust levels. Customers stay because the grass on the other side is not greener.

We talked about loyalty needing to start with the banks being loyal to the customer before they can expect the customer to be loyal in return.

And we talked about “Love”, and how if we can “love” brands operating in such mature and boring categories as book delivery, information organisation, telecoms, sandwich-making and tech then there is every opportunity to believe it could happen in banking.

A thought-provoking discussion that has given us new contacts around the banking world and has left us with a new presentation and fresh set of examples.   If you would like us to come and talk to your team about the new pressures on financial services brands and how you could change the experience from transactional to a loyal relationship, then do get in touch.