UK financial services company: monitoring welcoming

This regional financial institution marketed bank accounts, investments, savings, insurances, loans and mortgages. Its bank accounts were taken out by mortgage and savings account holders to support their 'main' product, and the bank account product line appeared buoyant. However, its customers normally had another account, from one of the 'mainline' banks, which they used for the majority of their financial transactions. So the profitability of its bank account business was low. It needed to make its chequebook and bank card 'front of wallet'. One programme it implemented was a 'welcoming programme' for bank account holders. This had two objectives. One was to inform customers about the advantages (for example, interest rates) of the product. The other was to monitor transactions over the first three months of the account and tailor different communication treatments to groups, depending on activity, to stimulate usage. This welcoming stage aimed to establish behaviours and attitudes before customers drifted into making the mental decision to keep this account 'back of wallet'. The programme was extremely successful, and more successful than other treatments designed to stimulate increased usage of the bank account later in the customer lifecycle.