Service Use and Transactions

Who are your major branch users?
Where do your new home banking households live?
How often do they use the service?

Overview

Market ID specializes in building proprietary databases from information contained on multiple systems that often have no common link for commingling disparate files. This potentially valuable information sometimes is held by outside vendors, has no useful report output capability or lacks useful context. Service use and associated transactions often fall in this category. This can include debit, ATM or credit card use but it may also include services such as home banking, bill paying or audio response systems.

By linking individual card holder, service user and their transaction levels together with household and geographic characteristics, Market ID is able to answer questions that transcend user and transaction totals.

Card and other service use

Households may interact with one of their financial service providers in a variety of ways and identifying the users and the extent of their use provides valuable input for branch and ATM placement, target marketing, service improvement and other business decisions. Market ID typically captures information relating to the use of:

This information is available for every user household, which means that household information can be used to describe these service users. Their geographic distribution and penetration of available households can be identified along with their age, associated balances, product use and profitability. This level of quantifiable data relating to users is often lacking when critical decisions are required or a review of past decisions is needed.

Transactions

Knowing the total number of transactions or the trend in monthly transactions is normally not enough to determine whether opportunities are available or a serious service deficiency is limiting growth.

Transactions are related to a service delivery capability; to a household; and to that household's related characteristics. These households can be profiled by their demographics or their related product use and balances to identify likely users. This linkage also is useful for providing geographic context to identify areas where households are primarily using foreign ATMs or where household branch use drops because of inconvenience. This is the type of information required to identify in-fill opportunities and branch service overlaps.

Delivery system channel users

We maintain a database of several thousand credit union households classified by the way they interact with their credit union and other institutions. This information is developed as part of the Member Preferences Surveys conducted each year by Market ID. This survey includes about 30 questions used to determine current and intended product use and the types of services used by these households. The answers to these questions enable us to classify households as self-service users, branch users, mixed-channel users and home banking users. This database allows us to link balances, product use, institution use and preferences to the way these households interact with their credit union.