Banks and other lending institutions have drawn a line in the sand. The banking industry perceives that legislation like the Dodd-Frank Bill has shifted the economic advantage they enjoyed in a deregulated financial economy back to consumers, at least in part. The line in the sand is simply a formula for risk adjustment. The banking community can no longer extract the high fees for credit card interest and other services to compensate for the higher risk and higher reward programs they engaged in for the last 10 years such as small business loans or sub-prime mortgages. The continuing fallout to the banks from the mortgage crisis they helped to create means that lending is only offered to those who pass what has become a stringent risk profile test. Bankers have determined that the best course of action in a recession economy is to shed the financially weakest of the consumers in their portfolio.
"Acquisition is still part of the game, but acquiring the right customers is more important than ever," Wes Nichols, CEO of MarketShare Partners, told AdvertisingAge. "Analytics plays a very critical role in making sure you're not only getting the right customers, but keeping the right customers."
The priority for any financial service customer acquisition program today is finding a way to efficiently target the most affluent individuals. This can mean a major change in old advertising strategies which focused on the masses. A study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau reveals that the 98 percent of top income earners are less likely to spend time watching television or listening to the radio than average Americans. They are, however, far more likely to log on to digital news, sports and financial media. High-income earners spend an average of 26 hours online each week, compared to the rest of the earning population, who average about 21 hours per week. That means that finding a way to engage these individuals through online advertisements is essential.
Semcasting's IP Audience Zones can help banks and financial institutions do just that. Using patented genetic algorithms and thousands of predictive models that leverage factors like affluence, life stage and political affiliation into account, Semcasting has separated the United States into over 5.2 million different "zones" that are scored against 120 demographic variables. IP Zones has 3+ times the reach of the traditional cookie-based targeting platforms and is 77 times more accurate than zip code geo-targeting. Each zone contains an average of 146 people which will allow banks and financial institutions to target carefully crafted messages to only their intended audiences to maximize to impact of marketing resources to the best prospects in today's risk-adjusted banking world.
Ray Kingman