Wipro, Efma Launch Global Retail Banking Digital Marketing Report 2013

Wipro Ltd, a global Information Technology, Consulting and Outsourcing company 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, has launched the first ever 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.

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.

Rajan Kohli, Vice President and Head – Banking and Financial Services, Wipro Ltd. said, “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 percent 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.”

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Wipro and Efma have created the first ever digital marketing capability index which helps benchmark the digital marketing capabilities of banks vis-à-vis the best in class. Only 13 percent 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 index also alludes to the fact that a majority of banks do not practice real-time event driven marketing and the ability to focus on personalisation.

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. In the survey, it was discovered that social media efforts were mainly managed by the marketing department followed by the branding and communications team. Also for over 80 percent of the banks surveyed, their social media spend was less than 500,000 Euros per annum.

Given the inevitable trend toward greater use of digital channels by consumers, the Wipro/Efma report recommends that banks should:

• Consider how they expect customers to interact with the bank five years from now, and particularly how they envisage customers will buy financial products in the future;

• Carefully assess the bank’s current digital marketing capabilities along the dimensions we have identified in this study to identify areas of weakness;

• Develop a plan for investment in digital marketing capabilities which will ensure that the bank is in a position to get ahead of, or at least keep pace with, competitors and changing consumer behavior;

• Monitor closely the developments in “Big Data” and where possible take the initial steps of testing some applications of the new technologies that are available.