Take a client you placed on a 5-year fix last year. Over the life of that deal, their bank is now planning to contact them somewhere between 780 and 1,300 times.
Three to five times a week, every week, for five years. That’s the published target – 80- to 100% of the customer base, every product, indefinitely. Call it a thousand messages.
Over the same five years, how many will you send?
The completion email. Possibly a Christmas card. A rate reminder somewhere around month fifty-four, when it’s already too late to matter.
THREE
One thousand to three. That’s the fight. And it has nothing to do with advice, rate, service or how good you are at your job.
Those numbers come from a McKinsey report published this month setting out how banks intend to stop losing customers.
It’s free, it’s 12 pages, and it lays out the whole thing – the technology, the sequence, the contact frequency, the order to build it in.
They’ve tested how hard they can push and found people don’t opt out in numbers until you’re at about one message a day. So three to five a week is comfortable. Every message written by AI, personalised across roughly fifteen elements, tested continuously.
Banks that got disciplined about when they send first and follow-up contact improved lead generation by up to 70%.
“The report itself gives the game away.”
The trouble is, most brokers will read all that and conclude it’s a bank problem requiring a bank budget. It isn’t, and the report itself gives the game away.
There’s a table in it showing how this gets phased in.
The first column — the pilot, before any of the serious infrastructure exists — is 10% of the customer base, one or two products, one or two channels, one or two messages a month. Live in three to four weeks.
Read that as a broker rather than a banker.
That’s 10% of your client bank. One product. Email and text. Two messages a month. Running inside a month.
That’s not a transformation programme. That’s a fortnight’s work in a CRM you’re already paying for.
CLEARER INSTRUCTIONS
Two other things in there are worth more to a small firm than they are to a bank.
One bank took its mobile account opening conversion from under 2% to nearly 10%. Five times better. Not through clever technology — by removing obstacles. Clearer instructions. Less data entry. Explaining why they needed each piece of information.
Now think about how many of your leads die at document four of eleven, requested by email, with no explanation of why any of them are needed. That client didn’t change their mind. They just gave up, and you filed it under lead quality.
“The second finding is the one I’d stick on the wall.”
The second finding is the one I’d stick on the wall. Customers who get a high volume of service-related alerts generate 30% more sales.
Not marketing. Service. Application submitted. Valuation booked. Offer received. Here’s the next step.
Every one of those feels like admin. Every one of them is revenue. Somebody has now measured it.
So where does that leave us.
You have the one thing a bank cannot build. You can ask a question. An engine can only infer – it reads what already went through a card reader and guesses at what comes next. It will never find out that her mum’s not well and they’re thinking about moving closer, or that his business is worth considerably more than the accounts suggest.
That’s a real advantage. It’s also completely worthless if you’re not in the room, and between one deal and the next, most firms aren’t in the room at all.
A thousand to three.
You’re not losing on advice. You’re losing on the fact that they turn up and you don’t.
