Global Retail Banking Digital Marketing Report

India’s leading tech services company Wipro Ltd. (NYSE:WIT), in association with Efma, a global not-for-profit organisation that brings together more than 3,300 retail financial services companies from over 130 countries, today launched a retail banking digital marketing report at the Efma Distribution Week conference in Brussels.

This report, the first of a series is based on a global survey of banks covering marketing and digital channels.

According to the report, the proliferation of digital channels is changing the way customers consume banking services, with digital soon to emerge as the primary channel of interaction.

Given this trend, banks are focusing on digital marketing initiatives to target this growing segment of customers. Location, context and behavior-specific real time event led marketing, driven by analytics will likely be the norm in the future, believes the report.

“Digital technologies, social media and the explosion of data are redefining customer engagement models. If we look at the marketing spend reported by the banks in our survey, traditional advertising represented just 55 per cent of the total marketing spend. The CMOs that we spoke with made it clear that the role of the CMO is changing as banks adapt to the development of new channels and capabilities,” said Rajan Kohli, VP and head – Banking and Financial Services, Wipro Ltd.

Wipro and Efma have created digital marketing capability index which helps benchmark the digital marketing capabilities of banks vis-à-vis the best in class. Only 13 per cent of the banks surveyed demonstrate the highest level of maturity in digital marketing.

The index measures the maturity of the banks on eight different capabilities; assessments including a bank’s capability on data management, offer delivery, marketing processes and usage of analytics.

The study also revealed that social media was not yet a part of mainstream marketing and is still not considered a key customer interaction channel.

According to the survey, social media efforts were mainly managed by the marketing department followed by the branding and communications team. Also for over 80 per cent of the banks surveyed, their social media spend was less than 500,000 Euros per annum, according to the report.

Photo courtesy: Wipro