Financial Services Industry Online in Australia

Some interesting insights from the panel discussion that included Nick Dalla Riva, Head of Online at NAB and Sascha Hunt, Senior Marketing Manager Internet & Telemarketing at Citibank Credit cards.

Citibank and NAB both spend about 10% of their marketing budget online.

Virgin Money spend over 50%! (if only all our clients were like that!)

Their focus is both on customer acquisition but also improving online services, such as Internet banking, to ensure the customers get a good online experience once they do join.

Chips in credit and debit cards will happen soon, and this will lend itself to chips going into phones for mobile payments. Neither bank would disclose specific plans or timeframes.

Phishing is a continual issue. NAB have introduced a new service whereby they will text a code to your cell phone which then have enter into the website to confirm any online payment. This is very clever I think.

Because of phishing they are highly restricted in the email communication they can do. For example, they won’t send out emails with embedded hyperlinks. This lends itself to moving towards RSS marketing as an alternative way of getting messages out to the consumers.

Both companies felt online should really be a division on its own with marketing and technology people in one team, rather than in operations or marketing departments, however, they didn’t feel this was a major issue.