CommBank Introduces Kaching For Facebook and 'Signals' Insight Platform

Commonwealth Bank of Australia continues to be one of the bank innovation leaders, announcing two social-based platforms this week. 'Kaching for Facebook' is an extension of the already popular Kaching smartphone app covered in a previous Bank Marketing Strategy post, allowing customers to do basic transactions within the Facebook website. 

In addition, CommBank introduced the 'Signals' insight hub that collects transactional data to allow customers to view and share how their transaction patterns compare with others.

Kaching Comes to Facebook

CommBank Kaching for Facebook is a new app that will give Australia's 12 million Facebook users access to everyday banking and payments on their favorite social network. Based on the popular Kaching mobile payments app, the new app lets users pay back money owed or make cash gifts to friends of family for birthdays or weddings. The app also allows a customer to view transaction history within the Facebook website.

"With Facebook popularity skyrocketing to more than 55 percent of the population in Australia, we know our customers, particularly Facebook's core user base of 18-35 year olds, are looking for new ways to connect their banking and their lives, friends and causes within Facebook," states Commonwealth Bank's chief marketing and online officer, Andy Lark. "So what better way to respond than by giving them access to everyday banking and payments on their favorite social network?"

Accessed directly from the Commonwealth Bank Kaching Facebook page, the app is a scaled down version of a typical online banking app optimized for mobile using responsive design.

Banks Need to Collect More Insights to Communicate Effectively

By Bob Williams, Director of Marketing Technologies at Harland Clarke and author of the blog, The Merchant Stand.

A friend and colleague Jim Marous shared an article from American Banker on Googe+ entitled Banks Underuse Mobile for Communication. The article discusses challenges that financial institutions have with communicating with their customers through mobile devices. While mobile device applications and mobile optimized sites are becoming more common, and expected by account holders, financial institutions are not using the mobile channel for proactive communication. Kael Kelly, senior director at Varolii is quoted in the article “Banks don’t have the data that they need. A lot of the phone number data doesn’t easily distinguish between a mobile number and a land-line.”

So the idea that banks don’t know what data they have made me think about some other data that Jim Marous shared about financial institutions and customer data. Like this tweet about banks not having email addresses for their account holders.

The challenge I see is missing or unintelligible customer profile data. That problem expands beyond the boundary of the financial services industry. It’s really a common need for any type of business. Another challenge is the misuse (or lack of use) of the data that an organization has. Another conversation with Jim last week revealed that he noticed his bank mention that online banking was 'down' using Twitter. While admirable that they used a more modern social media tool for this notification, there probably aren't many people following Twitter the way Jim does. Making matters worse, they didn't use either his email address (which is tied to his online banking account) or SMS (the bank has his cell phone) to make this notification. In other words, the bank had the tools, but didn't use what was at their disposal.

Brand Advocates Should Be Cultivated

Every bank talks about customer loyalty and advocacy, but many find it difficult to define what a brand advocate is, or what the value may be to their bank.

According to a study just released on the actions, motivations and influence of brand advocates conducted by Dr. Kathleen Ferris-Costa at the University of Rhode Island for social networking leader BzzAgent, brand advocates are 83% more likely to share information about a product than typical web users and 50% more likely to influence a purchase. Since they enjoy solving problems and helping other to make purchases and decisions, they are also 75% more likely to share a great experience and three times more likely to share their opinion with someone they don't know (they are also more likely to share a bad experience). In other words, this segment of your customer base acts and thinks very differently from your typical customer and should be searched out and cultivated.

Banks Need to Build Foundation for Effective Multichannel Marketing

While the BAI Retail Delivery Conference in Las Vegas doesn't officially begin until today, hundreds of attendees participated in a series of pre-conference workshops, including a session entitled, "Improving Acquisition, Onboarding and Cross-Sell Effectiveness with Multichannel Communication" which I was lucky enough to present with Matt Wilcox from Zions Bank and Tal Harry from Richter7. The workshop was attended by representatives from banks of all sizes and in various stages of multichannel marketing development.

During the session, we had several formal and informal surveys to determine where this limited cross section of the banking industry was with regard to their marketing mix.

Building Long-Term Deposits and Relationships Automatically

Over the past several years there have been a number of financial institutions that have built automatic savings programs where customers can set goals, establish recurring transfers between accounts to fund the goal(s), and track their savings progress.

One of the first programs developed was the Orange Savings Account from ING Direct which greatly simplified the process of opening new accounts for various savings goals. Following the success of the Orange Saving Account, SmartyPig was another program with that same goal in mind, making it easy for a customer to setup savings goals.

A customer can name their accounts, set the deadline for reaching their goals and even use an interactive calculator to determine the amount they will need to set aside each month. What makes Smartypig unique is that they added a social element to the mix . . . allowing other people such as friends and family members to contribute to the customer's goals as well.

Using Social Media for Financial Services Marketing

As I travel across the country, more and more banks are dipping their toes in the waters of social media. While the banking industry has been slower than most industries to embrace social networking, the tremendous growth in social networks, the need to better monitor and participate in social network conversations that are taking place, and the value of reaching customers and prospects on popular social networking sites has banks using Twitter, YouTube Facebook and other sites. This almost instantaneous communication comes with new challenges for banks, however, including informality of communication, higher customer service expectations and another venue for customers to voice discontent.

Nate Elliott from Forrester Research has decided to research and write a report on how financial services marketers can most effectively use social media. He is hoping to include data on how different types of financial customers engage with social media and is also hoping to collect more insight from the bank marketers' perspective.

He is looking for financial services marketers willing to walk him through examples of how you've used social media, talk to him about how you manage risk and work with your legal and compliance departments, and share with him some of the lessons you've learned in social media marketing. He can be reached at nelliott@forrester.com.