As consumers move through the various stages of life, their experiences strongly impact their spending behavior, their management of finances, and how they prepare for retirement. Retail banking strategies should embrace customer financial life stages by offering products and services to support these life stages and help transition from one life stage to another. Retail banks and other financial institutions don’t just offer checking accounts and mortgages to their customers, they provide solutions that support goals and lifestyles through every stage of life from opening the first account to getting ready for retirement.1 Retail banks that look beyond simply offering products, and instead, focus on helping customers achieve their goals, form lifelong relationships with their customers.
To effectively build a retail banking strategy with a product portfolio that helps meet your customers’ ever-changing financial needs and expectations, financial institutions need to continually strive to better understand their customers’ current life events and impending financial stages of life. To meet this objective, financial institutions should ask themselves these questions.
- What are the pivotal life events that impact my customer and how do we position our offerings to help them manage those events?
- How can we simplify our customers’ financial product experiences with the services we offer?
- What products and services can we provide to help our customers attain their financial goals at each financial stage of life?
- How can we help prepare our customers for upcoming or unforeseen life events?
Using customer transaction data has about its customers can help answer these questions and drive the institution’s product strategy.