Financial Benchmark Launched

In the US, financial specialist Javelin Strategy & Research has announced the launch of a benchmarking service to help clients compare market share, perceptions and other key performance indicators.

The firm's Bank Benchmark and Market Footprint Analysis targets the top US financial institutions (FIs) with information including customer types, behaviour and usage of services, satisfaction and loyalty: for example, it can reveal that Bank of America leads all the major banks in the percentage of its customers who use mobile banking, while customers of Citizens Bank use mobile banking even less than customers of small banks and members of credit unions.

Data comes from a 2010 survey of 5,000 US consumers. James Van Dyke, President & Founder of Javelin, says the services can help banks spot pitfalls and opportunities to boost profits through fee-based services such as identity protection, marketing or technology investments. 'However', he warns, 'Javelin data also shows that consumers who use multiple identity services actually leave their bank more frequently. Citi Bank has far more customers with two or three such services, showing evidence of both more fees and more loyalty risk.'

Reporting can be broken down three ways: a competitive analysis clustering financial institutions by size and/or type; by named institution for direct comparisons; and by geography, including region, state or where sample size is large enough, county.

Other initial results show that community bank customers and credit union members report much higher customer satisfaction scores and yet, due to limited access to ATMs, more customers have switched to larger banks - especially to U.S. Bank and Bank of America - than to community banks or credit unions. Among the large institutions, Wells Fargo's satisfaction scores were stronger than other large banks such as Bank of America, Citi, Chase and U.S. Bank.

'Banker channel strategies must adapt to the competitive realities' comments Shailaja Dixit, Javelin's Director of Data and Custom Research. 'Consumers use channels such as ATM, branch, online and mobile differently at banks or credit unions.'

Javelin specialises in strategic research on customer-facing financial services, payments and security initiatives and is online at www.javelinstrategy.com/research .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.