The art and science of financial retailing

In 2005, Europe will be visited by a road show that looks at how retail banks can make the most of their greatest retailing asset: millions of customer visits each year.

Now that the branch is widely accepted to be at the heart of banks’ strategies, leading banks are looking for new ways to make their networks pay. To answer the industry need, John Ryan, a world leader in financial retailing strategy and implementation, decided to take its latest ideas to the street: Last autumn the company hired a truck, filled it with innovative, bank-transforming ideas, and drove it across the USA for an 11-city, 11-week ‘Retail Lab’ tour. The event was so successful that the company is on the road again… this time across Europe.

Called ‘98 Ideas in 98 Minutes’, the show focuses on how financial retailers can realise the untapped revenue potential of the 98 per cent of branch visitors who leave without having made a purchase. Topics include:

• How understanding branch patronage and traffic patterns makes you a better retailer
• How scientific testing saves money by focusing deployment on those tactics that work best
• How to make the most out of now-affordable digital marketing tools
• How to build store traffic, and how to make that traffic pay: ‘The 1-2 Retailing Punch’

The road show also demonstrates how many front-office consumer marketing concepts can be used to gather customer insight, and how that customer insight can be immediately leveraged to further hone retail marketing efforts. In effect, it looks at how to apply the discipline of direct marketing to the hustle-bustle of a busy retail environment.

Building buying environments

Importantly, the ‘98 ideas’ are not about a superficial, aesthetic overhaul of the branch. They are about making the branch a more productive and engaging place to visit, improving customers’ experiences while also stimulating buying behaviour.

Buying and selling are two sides of the revenue-generation equation. While banks have focused their capital and human resource investment in selling (CRM, customer segmentation and profiling, sales training), less emphasis has been given to buying. The Retail Lab helps banks to jump-start their thinking by re-fashioning transactional outlets into stimulating buying environments.

Focus on branch visits

Founded in 1980, John Ryan is a multinational company with European offices in Madrid and London. The company uses both the ‘art’ and the ‘science’ of financial retailing to help its clients realise the revenue potential of their greatest retailing asset: millions of annual customer visits. Services involve analysing visit patterns to pinpoint retailing challenges and opportunities at each branch, building the retailing ‘toolkit’ to best address these findings, and using scientific testing practices to validate their efficacy before rolling them out to the network.

Prior to the road trip initiative, John Ryan showcased its ideas to retail bankers at the Merlin Center in Stamford, Connecticut – a centre The Economist described as ‘The future of retail banking’. Now that the Retail Lab travels to its audiences, it gets more exposure and more positive responses. One leading industry analyst described the Lab’s innovations as ‘strategic in implication, yet practical in application’.

The European Retail Lab Tour is scheduled to visit four cities between March and June: Paris, Prague, Istanbul and London. While in Paris, the show will coincide with EFMA’s ‘Growing Revenues in Mature Retail Banking Markets’ conference.

Further information

John Ryan
Tel: +34 91 5237400
Fax: +34 91 5237401
Email: eurotour@johnryan.com
Website: www.johnryan.com