Report produced for GFT by IESE Business School. November 2012. This paper analyze how the financial services sector can use technologies to improve their client engagement and business processes.

1. Blue Paper Impact of Social Media on the Financial
Services Sector
Report produced for GFT by IESE Business School | Authors: Juan A. Virgili and Professor Evgeny Kaganer
November 2012

2. Table of Contents
1 Executive Summary ................................................................................................................. 4
2 Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 5
3 Consumer Use of Social Media is Still Growing ................................................................... 5
4 The Customer Experience Journey in Banking is the Foundation for Social Media
Initiatives .................................................................................................................................. 6
4.1 Stage 1: Discover ...................................................................................................................... 6
4.2 Stage 2: Evaluate....................................................................................................................... 7
4.3 Stage 3: Buy .............................................................................................................................. 7
4.4 Stage 4: Use .............................................................................................................................. 7
4.5 Stage 5: Re-engage ................................................................................................................... 7
5 Applying Social Technologies in the Finance Industry Means Understanding the
Customer .................................................................................................................................. 8
6 Social Marketing ...................................................................................................................... 8
7 Social Marketing Use Cases and Examples .......................................................................... 9
7.1 Social campaigns ....................................................................................................................... 9
7.2 Brand presence ........................................................................................................................10
7.3 Consumer recommendations / reviews ...................................................................................10
7.4 Nurturing of advocates .............................................................................................................11
7.5 Voice of customer ....................................................................................................................11
8 Social CRM .............................................................................................................................12
9 Social CRM Use Cases and Examples.................................................................................12
9.1 Listen & Respond.....................................................................................................................12
9.2 Customer self-services ............................................................................................................12
9.3 P2P Support .............................................................................................................................13
9.4 Voice of customer ....................................................................................................................14
10 Compared to Social Marketing, Social CRM is one of the Strategic Options for
Financial Service Providers ..................................................................................................14
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3. 11 Measuring Social Initiatives Means Transparent Metrics ..................................................15
12 Social Increases the Size of the Pie: New Business Opportunities for FSPs .................17
13 New business models Use Cases ........................................................................................17
13.1 P2P lending / financing ............................................................................................................17
13.2 P2P micropayments .................................................................................................................18
13.3 Community banking .................................................................................................................18
13.4 New Business Models are the Long Tail .................................................................................19
14 Applying social in finance means overcoming external regulations, internal
resistance, and updating systems .......................................................................................19
14.1 External Regulations ................................................................................................................19
14.2 Internal Resistance ..................................................................................................................20
14.3 Traditional transactional Systems ............................................................................................21
15 Future Trends Involve Mobile Convergence and Big Data Management .........................21
15.1 Integration of social and mobile ...............................................................................................21
15.2 The “big data” opportunity ........................................................................................................22
16 Appendix 1: Classification of Social Technologies ...........................................................24
This report has been published in cooperation with IESE Business School based on a number of interviews with industry
experts and secondary market research. The intention of the report is to make trends transparent and understandable
within their context and give the readers impulses for their business. The content has been created with the utmost
diligence. Therefore, we are not liable for any possible mistakes.
GFT Technologies AG
Executive Board: Ulrich Dietz (CEO), Jean-François Bodin, Marika Lulay, Dr. Jochen Ruetz.
Chairman of the Supervisory Board: Dr. Paul Lerbinger
Commercial Register of the local court (Amtsgericht): Stuttgart, Register number: HRB 727178
Copyright © 2012 GFT Technologies AG. All rights reserved.
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4. 1 Executive Summary
Based on a number of interviews with industry experts, this paper will analyze how the financial
services sector can use social technologies to improve their client engagement and business
processes. In this case, social technologies refer not only to
This paper analyzes how financial internal social communication platforms, but also to external social
service providers (FSPs) can use marketing solutions and integrated social customer relationship
social technologies to improve their
management initiatives.
client engagement and business
processes The financial service sector is distinctly unique from other
industries such as consulting and retail. The customer is diverse
and the customer experience journey in banking has its own unique influences that change the main
touch points that the customer has with the bank. Analyzing these touch points from the brand
perspective reveals that there are five main phases where the customer interacts with the institution:
discovery, evaluation, buying, use, and re-engagement. The
intricacies of each stage become important for a correctly
Customers interact with their FSP
positioned strategy as each stage has its own specificities that
along five main stages: discovery,
alter the objectives and shape the limits of social initiatives. The
evaluation, buying, use, and re-
discover stage is driven by customer needs that are out of the
engagement
banks control and based on the customer life cycle. The
evaluation phase is marked by complexity and the necessity for
professional help. The buying phase is limited by regulations. The use stage is hyperextended,
meaning that the length of time a client is engaged with an institution is extended over a longer
period of time than in other industries. And finally, past engagements carry significant weight in the
re-engagement stage.
Based on this analysis, certain conclusions have been drawn to help financial institutions understand
the benefits of implementing social technologies in this industry,
Currently, the majority of social initia- how this implementation can be measured and how the barriers to
tives are focused on social marketing, adoption can be mitigated. Existing examples of the current
but it would be strategically more situation and usage of social technologies from financial entities
beneficial for FSPs to integrate social
highlight success cases and the maturity of social initiatives in this
with CRM programs
industry. At the moment, the majority of social initiatives are
focused on social marketing, but based on the banking customer
experience journey, it would be strategically more beneficial for financial service providers (FSPs) to
integrate social with existing customer relationship management programs (Social CRM).
Looking forward, the two main trends facing the industry in terms of social media will be:
 The convergence of social and mobile, resulting in higher adoption of mobile payments
externally and mobile communication internally
 The opportunity to leverage the “big data” available in social engagement in order to
improve the existing customer engagement Mobile Market Share
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5. 2 Introduction
This is a report about the implications of social media, of current practices and future opportunities in
the financial services industry. Based on a number of interviews with industry experts, this paper will
analyze how the financial services sector can use social
Based on a number of interviews with technologies to improve client engagement and business
industry experts, this paper will processes. In this case, social technologies refer to external social
analyze how the financial services
marketing solutions and integrated social customer relationship
sector can use social technologies to
management initiatives on both public and proprietary customer
improve client engagement and
facing interfaces. Please see Appendix 1 for a Classification of
business processes
Social Technologies based on how they empower users.
3 Consumer Use of Social Media is Still Growing
The statistics continue to show increasing adoption of social media, with over 1.5 billion social
networking users globally (Source: eMarketer, Feb. 2012). The use of social media is shifting to a
point at which brand following is becoming mainstream, further closing the gap between the use of
social media for leisure and the potential for business social media
Social media growth is explosive and use. As Edison Research shows, “From 2010 to 2012, the
is having a big impact on every percentage of Americans following any brand on a social network
vertical industry, including financial increased from 16% to 33%.”
services
Based on a 2012 Report from Social Media Examiner, “A
significant 83% of marketers surveyed indicate that social media is
important for their business.” Despite this, many executives often believe that all users of social
media are digital natives, individuals who were born during or after the general introduction of digital
technology and have a greater understanding of its concepts. While the truth is that there is an
increasing number of social media users aged 50 and above. Edison Research shows that, “The
biggest growth of any age cohort from 2011 to 2012 was 45-54 year-olds, in fact 55% of Americans
45-54 now have a profile on a social networking site.”
Another significant change is that social networks are now used for referencing content, which is
becoming an increasingly important method for influencing
Social networks are now used for purchasing behaviors. Edison Research states that, “Only 36% of
referencing content, an increasingly those surveyed said that social media networks had no influence
important method for influencing on their buying decisions, and 47% claimed that Facebook held
purchasing behaviors the greatest impact on purchasing behavior.” This has led to
emerging patterns in which particularly interesting content has the
potential to spread virally, reaching well beyond the number of active fan users of a Facebook page
or a Twitter profile. As Carles Segu, the Internet/Social Media Manager at Catalana Occidente,
describes, “[Virality] is the reason why, while we have only 4,000 fans in our profile, an average of
130,000 individuals read our posts, with high engagement rates.”
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6. 4 The Customer Experience Journey in Banking is the Foundation for
Social Media Initiatives
The banking customer is unique in his/her interaction and engagement with the financial institution.
All customers have distinct objectives and needs from their financial service providers. Given these
differences, it is important to visualize a roadmap of the customer
It is fundamental to understand the experience in order to understand at which point in the
specific customer experience journey engagement process and to what extent social media can be used
in banking in order to understand how as a tool. The Customer Experience Journey is a widely accepted
social media can be applied model that explains the relationship of engagement between a
customer and a product or service. It narrates how customers
advance through the stages of discovery, evaluation, purchase, use and re-engagement. The way in
which this model applies to the banking and financial industry is distinctly different to the way in
which it applies to other industries such as retail, consulting, or production. This difference becomes
especially apparent when analyzing the specificities of the banking customer perspective in each of
the five phases of the customer experience journey.
4.1 Stage 1: Discover
The needs of a customer who is engaging with a financial service provider are difficult to shape. If a
customer does not have a job, hardly will he or she require a
Stage 1 – Discover: The needs of a payroll account, and without significant income, they will not
customer who is engaging with a FSP engage in a mortgage. The appeal of the financial services
are difficult to shape portfolio is then dependent to a large extent on the evolution of the
personal life cycle of each customer. This means that traditional
push-oriented marketing initiatives aiming at helping customers discover new needs may not be
efficient in this situation.
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7. 4.2 Stage 2: Evaluate
The nature of the financial industry makes evaluating products or
Percentage decrease of
services a complex process. customer confidence in the
Stage 2 – Evaluate: Peer advice is be- Customers will require expert banking industry
coming more and more relevant, espe- and peer advice before
making a choice. Peer advice
cially important when confidence in
banking is decreasing is becoming more and more World: 40 %
relevant, especially as we
have seen a recent decrease
of customer confidence in the banking industry. Italy: 72 %
4.3 Stage 3: Buy
The main barrier in terms of engaging with customers through Spain: 76 %
open channels is that in the purchasing stage, as well as in the
use stage, sensitive personal Source: Ernst & Young, Global
Stage 3 – Buy: The main barrier when data are often involved. This Consumer Banking Survey, 2012
engaging with customers in open results in a decrease in the
channels is the involvement of sensitive willingness of customers to share their information and
personal data experiences. Also, high regulation in the financial industry may
limit the amount of information sharing and interaction levels
throughout public platforms such as social media.
4.4 Stage 4: Use
In the case of the relationship between a customer and his/her FSP, the Use stage of a given
financial product is hyperextended, as the use of financial
Stage 4 – Use: The Use stage of a given services is usually long term. Also, the need for engagement
financial product is hyperextended, as its between service provider and customer may be small or even
use is usually long term non-existent throughout this stage. Following our previous
example of payroll accounts, once the account has been opened,
as long as there is not a deficient service, the customer may not need to engage with his/her provider
directly as the provision of the service is entirely automated.
4.5 Stage 5: Re-engage
Product purchases keep building up on each other in the life cycle of a customer with an FSP, and as
a consequence, the more a given customer advances in his or her
Stage 5 – Re-engage: Product purcha- relationship with a given FSP, the less likely he or she is to leave
ses keep building up on each other in that FSP. Each subsequent purchasing decision is not
the life cycle and create important exit independent from the previous ones. For example, while changing
barriers, but customers are starting to a payroll account is fairly simple, once a customer engages with
have relationships with multiple FSPs
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8. loans, insurances and mortgages with a given FSP, the hassle of changing his/her service provider
creates an important exit barrier, boosting the chances of re-engagement with his current FSP and
making this exit barrier grow further. Regardless, a new trend has recently emerged to challenge this
paradigm: multi-banking. Customers are starting to engage in several relationships with different
financial institutions meaning that mastering the re-engagement phase of the customer experience
journey will prove evermore important in the future for FSPs.
5 Applying Social Technologies in the Finance Industry Means
Understanding the Customer
Taking into account the specificities of the customer experience journey in the banking industry, it is
important to analyze how social media is currently being applied in
Social Marketing, Social CRM and the financial sector. There are currently three areas where
new business models are the three financial institutions are applying social media. Two of these areas
areas where financial institutions are focus on enhancing existing business processes, while the third
applying Social Media category attempts to reinvent a certain space within the financial
services industry all together.
 Social marketing: Using social tactics, media, tools, and technologies across all components
of the marketing mix: product, price, promotion, placement.[1]
 Social CRM: Expanding CRM systems from optimized customer-facing transactional
processes to include simultaneous interactions and conversations that customers have among
them; in order to improve business processes and supporting technologies in: targeting,
acquiring, retaining, understanding, listening to, and collaborating with customers.
 New business models: Social networks have created a space for new services that is slowly
being filled by small sized entrepreneurial companies.
6 Social Marketing
Social marketing has its most relevant impact in the evaluate/compare stage of the customer
experience journey, as it increases the impact of influencing marketing initiatives through the ability
to use references in social media and intensify brand awareness. Social marketing becomes valuable
when the purchase of one product is ongoing and the acquisition of the next might be delayed by
years as this is often the case in the finance industry. The purpose of social marketing is to keep the
[1]
Direct sales through social media in finance have seen limited success. This is due to the nature of financial
products and the customer life cycle. Purchases are not impulsive, are usually researched, and are based on
the customer’s specific needs. A direct sales strategy through social media would involve a push strategy
which would not fit well in this highly regulated environment.
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9. engagement of the users at its maximum possible level to ensure that they will have no doubt about
which FSP to choose when the time comes to purchase their next banking product.
The main differentiating factor related to social marketing is the quality and adequacy of the content
provided. Social media channels are constantly flooded with an
Some of the best practices in social unending stream of fresh new content. Keeping up the speed by
marketing in finance are based on providing ‘fresh’ content daily is key to fostering engagement and
content marketing: offering relevant avoiding an inactive user base. Some of the best practices in
and useful content in return for the
social marketing in finance are based on content marketing:
users’ engagement and loyalty
offering relevant and useful content in return for the users’
engagement and loyalty. This means that maintaining a high
speed of decision making for which content to promote and how to do it becomes vital.
7 Social Marketing Use Cases and Examples
7.1 Social campaigns
Social campaigns are initiatives carried at one point in time, as opposed to brand presence building
which is an on-going strategy. Social campaigns can consist of different actions such as new product
proposition, new product launch or contests to increase
engagement. Catalana Occidente decided to launch several
In social campaigns, companies are
social campaigns to increase the number of their community
not only tracking customer adoption
members and their engagement. During this campaign, which
rates but also user retention rates
aimed to promote insurance services, the company decided to
offer three iPhone 4 terminals for the winners. As a consequence,
the amount of users that befriended the company on its Facebook portal increased dramatically, but
decreased just by the same manner as soon as the campaign was over. Those users were interested
in an iPhone, not in the products and services Catalana Occidente offered. In their following
campaign, the company made some changes in order to align the campaign with the objective by
making the reward an insurance policy. In this way, the company managed to attract those
customers that were indeed interested in insurance services and products. As a result, the retention
rate of those customers attracted by the campaign was much higher.
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10. 7.2 Brand presence
Brand presence includes an ongoing effort to leverage
social-media to promote, develop, strengthen, or defend
a product or company brand. A good example of using
social marketing to enhance brand presence can be
found at CitiBank. With more than half a million likes on
its Citibank US Facebook portal, the company
completely ignores any kind of banking message in the
many daily communications, attempting instead to
merely create conversation and engagement amongst
users with polls on their favorite foods or sports teams.
7.3 Consumer recommendations / reviews
Consumers value the ratings and reviews from
other consumers very highly. These reviews are
also a great
The impact of consumer reviews and source of
recommendations on business is feedback and
starting to be adopted in financial customer sentiment. The impact of consumer reviews and
services recommendations on business is clearly visible in the hospitality
industry, where sites like TripAdvisor have become the major
discovery and lead generation tools. Now, the trend is starting to take roots in financial services. My
Bank Tracker is an online community portal dedicated to the reviews of the different banks and
currently holds above 5,000 postings and features bank profiles for each of the banks reviewed on its
site.
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11. 7.4 Nurturing of advocates
Fostering the creation of hyper-engaged users
that reference the branded content to their own
contacts – brand advocates – increases the viral
transmission of published content on social
campaigns. The key to creating brand advocates
lies in engaging the customers in the channel
where they interact, making sharing easy, and
adding incentives for participation and gamification (the use of
game design elements, game thinking and game mechanics to
The key to creating brand advocates
lies in engaging with the customers in enhance non-game contexts). Barclays did just that by launching
the channel where they interact the Barclaycard community ring, a social community for users of
their Credit Card, giving a rich profile to each of the users,
rewarding the use of cards with badges and listening to improve service according to feedback.
7.5 Voice of customer
Today, customers have access to limitless selections of anything they want, creating unprecedented
choice. This choice, combined with the voice created by being able to talk to one another through
social media, means that customers have lots of power. More and more, customers wish to be
participants in the creation of new services. They want more
More and more, customers wish to be personalized and tailored solutions. Voice of Customer (VoC)
participants in the creation of new initiatives can be aimed at fostering engagement and loyalty (i.e.,
services. They want more marketing) or at leveraging customer feedback for new product
personalized and tailored solutions development (i.e., CRM). CRM use cases will be discussed below.
An example of a VoC initiative used for marketing comes from
Deutscher Sparkassen und Giroverband (DSGV), an umbrella organization of the German
regional saving banks associations, which set up a Facebook portal for its customers to complain
about everything they felt was wrong with current banking practices and to propose improvements.
DSGV managed to retain more than 150.000 customers that took part in this initiative as Facebook
fans. The initiative also helped the company improve its image from a traditional conglomerate to a
modern, up-to-date banking group.
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12. 8 Social CRM
The impact of Social CRM in the customer experience journey relates mostly to the Use stage, as all
the CRM initiatives are dedicated to improving the usage of products by customers or to retrieving
[2]
information on how to improve this usage. Social CRM is focused on customer engagement versus
traditional customer management. Defined as a new path to interact
Social CRM is focused on customer with the customer, Social CRM is characterized by its immediacy
engagement versus traditional and ubiquity. Response times of one hour are the new standard.
customer management
Tablets and smartphones have broken all previously existing
hardware barriers to accessing social media. Companies are left to
decide how to view social CRM: As the CRM component of their social strategy or as the social
component of their CRM strategy. Gartner Research estimates that, “By 2014, refusing to
communicate with customers via social channels will be as harmful as ignoring emails or phone calls
is today.” Please see the Big Data Opportunities in the Future Trends section below to understand
how data collected through social CRM can improve decision making in the company.
A new CRM channel carries a "maintenance obligation.” Once a presence has been established, it
must be supported. This means providing ongoing updates, responding to complaints, and keeping a
team fully or partially dedicated to this task. Gartner states, “While communicating with Twitter or
Facebook might be optional today, over the next three years not allowing people to contact your
organization via these means will be viewed as old-fashioned.” Social CRM is all about finding the
customer where the customer is and when the customer wants.
9 Social CRM Use Cases and Examples
9.1 Listen & Respond
Listening and responding involves focusing on the detection of potential support situations voiced in
a social environment such as Twitter or Facebook. Banco Sabadell
More and more financial institutions has dedicated a team to search through different platforms for
are seriously considering the listen & customer complaints and discussions regarding their service and
respond challenge in social media
offerings. Once an issue is detected, those agents will take the
decision of answering in the same channel, or try to lead the user to
communicate with support services, social or traditional.
9.2 Customer self-services
Delivering product or service-related knowledge from a knowledge repository to a customer via a
self-service interface involves maintaining a constantly updated knowledge repository to enable fast
[2]
Much broader definitions of Social CRM incorporate earlier stages of the Customer Experience Journey. For
the purpose of this paper, we take a narrow view, as defined above.
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13. and timely retrieval of relevant information. The repository needs to be well structured to allow at
least 85% relevance of responses to searches and questions asked. Lloyds TSB has deployed a
very advanced self-service portal, which integrates all of the tools at its disposition, including as a
virtual assistant who browses the knowledge database to provide accurate answers and suggestions
to the questions users send. Today, customer self-service can be enhanced through Peer-to-Peer
(P2P) support, as described below.
9.3 P2P Support
Being able to harness the knowledge of customers directly involves engaging, supporting and
managing an online community, as its members identify problems and create solutions. This may
also foster engagement between employees of the company and customer. As stated in Gartner’s
2010 report, Top Use Cases and benefits for Successful Social CRM, “During the next five years, it is
expected that community peer-to-peer support will replace Tier 1
Being able to harness the knowledge phone support in over 40% of the top 1,000 companies with a
of customers directly involves enga- contact center.” A current example of P2P support does not yet
ging, supporting and managing an on- exist in the finance industry due to the high level of access to
line community, as its member’s iden-
sensitive data that financial services support often requires. In
tify problems and create solutions
order to better understand what P2P Support entails, we can look
at Hewlet Packard (HP), which, like banking, is a company with a
wide range of products that often have operational complexities. In order to face all the queries from
its users who were dispersed between different product ranges and problem types (software/
hardware), HP launched its consumer support forum in seven languages for over 20 countries.
Behind the interface, is a P2P support database forum, with a search engine to search within existing
posts as well as a descriptive topic menu for
assistance. More than 4.6 million HP customers
have had their issues resolved through the forum
to date, with large savings in cost and time for
Tier 1 phone support.
On a more general level, some financial entities
have begun moving in this direction. Bank of
America, for example, has set up the Bank of
America Small Business Community online
where owners of small businesses can
exchange ideas and information. Users benefit from the experience of others by starting or joining a
conversation in the forums or posting in a review. Another example is Unience, a Spanish company
which has created a financial social network where users such as individual investors, investment
advisors, asset managers, and financial companies, can share investment advice and connect with
one another.
P2P support can also be boosted through collaborative customer interfaces, which enable a
customer service agent and a customer to simultaneously share a live version of the same business
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14. application in order to solve users’ issues. In industries such as financial services, businesses will be
able to offer highly personalized customer experiences, as well as a feeling of participation by the
customers in the resolution of issues. For example, a Fortune 200 US insurance company
implemented eGain Co-browse, eGain Chat and eGain ClickToCall in a bundled package to improve
the purchase ratio, customer enrollment and service experiences to its members. Online form filling
is a major hurdle in the customer acquisition and onboarding processes, especially in regulated
sectors like financial services, insurance, health care, and government. Increasingly complicated
forms confuse and frustrate customers. The company realized that as a result, 75% of all web forms
are abandoned. With the co-browsing service platform, their agents help customers complete web
forms in a convenient and secure manner - while simultaneously engaging them in a phone call or
text chat. These agents not only provide real-time form-filling assistance but also show members how
to use the company website through co-browse-enabled phone conversations. The deployment has
enabled the company to increase online form completion by 200%.
9.4 Voice of customer
VoC use in CRM extends social media monitoring by identifying salient discussion topics and
soliciting further feedback on these from individual customers and/or customer communities.
Companies may solicit four forms of feedback: answers to
VoC use in CRM extends social media customer complaints, personalized surveys for each community
monitoring by identifying salient member, topic-based surveys/polls, and general satisfaction
discussion topics and soliciting surveys and comments. A good example of a company currently
further feedback on these from employing VoC for CRM use is Standard Bank, which constantly
individual customers and/or customer embeds polls and surveys among its blogging services to increase
communities the engagement of readers and obtain feedback. One example of
Standard Bank’s poll is: “Which Standard Bank self-service
channel do you use most often?” Possible answers were: Cell phone banking, Internet Banking, ATM
Banking, or Mobile banking app. 42% of 151 participants chose Internet Banking. Other polls include:
“What do you look for in a bank?” “How much value do you place on having 24/7 access to banking?”
and “How would you describe Standard Bank’s Service?”
10 Compared to Social Marketing, Social CRM is one of the Strategic
Options for Financial Service Providers
Considering the specificities of the customer journey in the finance industry, it is surprising to see that
the main emphasis of FSPs when it comes to social media lies in
Social CRM focuses primarily in the the area of social marketing. Social marketing focuses on the
hyperextended use stage, as well as stages in which there might be a lesser impact in terms of
in influencing purchasing behavior influencing behavior or providing benefits for the customer or the
through the evaluate and buy stages FSP, such as the discover, evaluate, and re-engage phases.
Social CRM, on the other hand, focuses primarily in the
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15. hyperextended use stage, as well as in influencing purchasing behavior through the evaluate and
buy stages. Providing customer service and listening to clients would increase the trust that has of
late been eluding banks, it would help the entity understand the customers’ needs, and it would allow
the customer to voice their opinion more openly. This would in turn make the customer feel that this
particular bank appreciates him/her as an individual. The bank would earn praise from that individual
on social networks, which would attract more customers. On the
Developing social CRM allows for backend, although social marketing is a good tool for marketing
faster decision making throughout and communications teams, developing social CRM allows for
various internal departments faster decision making throughout various internal departments.
Sales, product development, account managers, all the way up
to senior executives would be able to use data mined from social CRM to increase market
understanding and incrementally speed up decision making. Therefore, FSPs will have to start
shifting to the use of Social CRM to have a deeper, measurable impact on bottom-lines.
11 Measuring Social Initiatives Means Transparent Metrics
Establishing a clear social strategy requires transparency and the creation of well-established metrics
for success. These metrics are often illusive and hard to valuate. Social Marketing and Social CRM
both share similar Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) though
Social CRM KPIs are by nature more the benefits of social marketing are more difficult to monetize.
customer-oriented and often more Given that social marketing actions can hardly be measured by
tangible to measure than those of
direct ROI, the main metric to measure the success of a given
social marketing initiatives
initiative is referentiality, or the viral spread of given content.
This measure gives an unbiased estimate of the level of
engagement of a user base. The ultimate goal of social marketing is to turn the community members
15

16. into de facto marketers, who will spread content virally through their networks, driving up the views
and increasing the chances of engagement from non-users.
Besides referentiality, there are more concrete metrics that are already being successfully employed
by financial institutions running social initiatives. When it comes to determining if social initiatives are
increasing brand presence, the main KPIs are the number of active community members (followers,
fans...) and the traffic directed to the corporate website. The key to correct performance metrics is
not to measure fans, but to measure active fans. Active fans in banking are those users who interact
with the company by posting on the banks’ Facebook wall or
The key to correct performance commenting on text, videos or pictures which the banks post to
metrics is not to measure fans, but to their corporate pages. These users are more likely to drive
measure active fans business. Social campaign success in general can be gauged as
the percentage increase in community interaction, the percentage
decrease and cost savings of printed collateral, percentage decrease in spending on low-performing
campaigns, number of campaign views / participants, post-campaign retention rate, and the number
of actions triggered by the feedback of users. Other social marketing KPIs depend on the objectives
of the initiative. When it comes to nurturing advocates, the most important visible and measureable
metrics are customer referrals and friend invites. Regarding consumer recommendations/reviews,
again it is important to monitor the number of active community members, number of times the
reviews are visited or seen, and the number of actions triggered by analysis of data.
Social CRM KPIs are by nature more customer-oriented and often more tangible to measure than
those of social marketing initiatives. The key KPIs are the decrease in response speed, time to
respond to “unresolved” queries, the reduction of cost and time for
Alongside traditional CRM metrics, it support, the number of actions triggered by analysis of data,
is also important to establish new percentage increase in community interaction, and active
social sentiment measures community participants. Alongside traditional CRM metrics, such
as the number of cases closed per day, the number of calls
handled per agent, or first-time call resolution; to receive full benefits from Social CRM, it is equally
important to establish new social sentiment measures. Highlighting the link between Social CRM and
social marketing, if a company offers quality service, customers will turn into advocates and start
promoting the brand. Social sentiment can be measured through metrics such as social conversation
buzz, reach, and value.
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17. 12 Social Increases the Size of the Pie: New Business Opportunities for
FSPs
Up to this point we have observed the ways social media and collaboration technologies allow
companies to enhance their existing processes. But in fact, by
By enabling rich direct interactions enabling rich direct interactions among individuals, social media
among individuals, social media has has also given light to a whole new way of conducting business in
also given light to a whole new way of financial services. These new business models are still a tiny slice
conducting business in financial of the industry but their rapid growth over the last few years and
services
disruptive value proposition certainly make them worthy of
attention.
13 New business models Use Cases
13.1 P2P lending / financing
Creating a platform that both lenders and creditors can access to post and select their needs and find
suitable matches will reduce the need and cost of intermediation when investing in or acquiring
unsecured personal loans. Mainly run as non-bank Financial Social Networks (FSN) platforms, they
are replacing banks in certain niche areas that will grow in size
Creating a P2P lending platform that and importance, and therefore must be tracked closely. With
both lenders and creditors can access greater than 100% year over year growth, P2P lending is one of
will reduce the need and cost of the fastest growing industries in the US. The P2P lending industry
intermediation when investing in or volume is over $50 million in new loans a month and in May 2012,
acquiring unsecured personal loans total loan volume passed the $1 billion mark since the industry
[3]
began back in 2006. Lending Club is a peer lending social
network portal in which two types of users converge, registered investors and registered borrowers.
The borrowers fill a form explaining their funding needs and the nature of their project or loan, while
the investors can build a portfolio of different portions of different borrowers. Similarly, Kickstarter, a
start-up founded in 2009, has created an online platform for P2P funding for all types of creative
projects. Kickstarter facilitates gathering monetary resources from the general public for projects
where creators choose a deadline and a goal of minimum funds to raise. If the chosen goal is not
gathered by the deadline, no funds are collected. Kickstarter takes 5% of the funds raised. As of
October 10, 2012, there were 73,620 launched projects (3,426 in progress), with a success rate of
43.85%. The total number of dollars pledged was $381 million.
[3]
Renton, Peter. Peer To Peer Lending Crosses $1 Billion In Loans Issued. May 29 2012
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18. 13.2 P2P micropayments
P2P micro-payments enable members of social networks to initiate a payment for digital content or to
make small person-to-person (P2P) payments for other purposes. The business impact of this model
extends well beyond payment operations. It creates awareness of
bank payment services among an often younger audience. VISA
The business impact of a P2P micro-
payments model extends well beyond Payclick is a micropayment program launched by Visa in
payment operations Australia. Payclick allows users to fund an account that is then
drawn from when purchases at participating online retailers are
made. Anyone with a Visa, MasterCard or bank account, can open a payclick account to buy from a
range of sellers without sharing personal details or financial information. Greg Storey, General
Manager, Payclick, says, “Payclick is designed to facilitate the growing consumer demand to make it
easy and secure to buy downloadable content including music, games and movies.” Payclick offers
an innovative ‘Sponsored Account’ feature, allowing teenagers to buy digital content safely and
securely. Parents/guardians set up an account on behalf of their teenager and facilitate money
deposits. Teenagers can then buy from payclick sellers using their own account and password, while
parents have access to real-time transaction history to monitor purchases.
13.3 Community banking
Community banking extends the use of Voice of
Customer to the point at which the customers
are the ones tailoring the solutions to be offered
later by the bank. It exploits the lack of
necessity for branch intermediation to reduce
costs and centralize efforts in the online
platform, providing an augmented level of
personalization and interaction with other
customers for advice and socializing. It also
exploits social media and the engagement it creates with their
Community banking exploits the lack users to reduce marketing costs. One of the most innovative
of necessity for branch intermediation banks in the industry at the moment is Fidor Bank which has
to reduce costs and centralize efforts been listed in the German stock exchanges since 2007, and
in the online platform, providing an
started operations in 2006. All operations are online and the
augmented level of personalization
company describes itself as, “banking with friends.” The sign-on to
and interaction with other customers
Fidor Bank is through Facebook Connect which, at this time, is
for advice and socializing
one of the only banks that allows that. The bank doesn’t just
aggregate accounts but, on a single page, a customer can view all
their account holdings from savings and investments through to precious metals and even virtual
currencies, such as World of Warcraft Gold. Aside from the customers being able to crowdfund, bet
online, and design and poll on new products and offerings, perhaps the most astonishing offering of
Fidor Bank is their interest rates, which vary according to Facebook Likes. The rule is simple: The
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19. more Facebook Likes, the higher the interest rate. The more Facebook Likes Fidor Bank acquires
from its customers and their friends, the higher interest rates the company pays on the deposits it
hold.
13.4 New Business Models are the Long Tail
The new business models outlined above represent a significant departure from the traditional
thinking prevalent in the financial services industry. By fostering direct connections among customers
and by shifting core processes onto an online platform where they can be operated in a self-service
mode, these models are changing the cost structure to a point where it becomes viable to serve a
large number of very small customers and transactions. Often referred to as the long tail
environment, this approach is not currently on the radar of
Fueled by the viral nature of the social traditional FSPs due to its unattractive below-average returns and
media environment, new P2P models perceived “lack of quality” in the services provided. Yet, as history
may disrupt the status quo in the
has proven many times over, the incumbent FSPs will do well to
industry by rendering some of the
keep a close eye on the growth and evolution of these new
existing business models obsolete
socially-enabled business models. The quality will likely improve
over time and larger more traditional customers may become
enticed by the new value proposition. If these dynamics gain traction, fueled by the viral nature of the
social media environment, the new P2P models may disrupt the status quo in the industry by
rendering some of the existing business models obsolete and/or by opening up new business niches.
14 Applying social in finance means overcoming external regulations,
internal resistance, and updating systems
14.1 External Regulations
A hurdle that is unique to the financial services sector is the high level of regulation especially
surrounding data privacy and security. Companies must be aware of these regulatory conditions
when establishing social media initiatives. In order to protect consumer privacy, regulators keep a
close eye on how companies collect and use customer data. For example, the US Federal Trade
Commission (FTC) regularly addresses social media and consumer privacy, calling for a social
perspective on its “do not track” proposal, similar to the “do not
First barrier – External regulations: call” lists from telemarketing. Also, with many existing laws around
Companies must be aware of these managing customer information, regulators now guide companies’
regulatory conditions when establishing social data collection and management policies. For example, the
social media initiatives US Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) enforces
regulations related to how financial advisors must keep records of
all social media activity around their brands. And due to the public nature of social media, regulators
are working to guide companies on how to manage the information that exists on the social web. For
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20. example, the UK Financial Services Authority (FSA) sets out guidelines around how financial
institutions should control branded content online — such as on Facebook pages or Twitter. The
FSA’s stance is that, because consumers may interpret any social content they see as a promotion,
financial institutions must treat any publicly available content as they would treat a form of owned
media. Compliance Guides and companies helping financial institutions with these issues already
exist. Some companies internalize this process and provide employees a set of restrictions on what
can be publicized through their central governance bodies, involving the legal team and adding social
media details to data policies. Other companies look to partners in the industry: outside experts for
their experience with social media regulations. The best-suited partners will have internal employees
or teams dedicated to following and understanding the regulations in the finance industry.
14.2 Internal Resistance
The idea to run new social initiatives often comes from the bottom up, such as at Banco Sabadell,
where the decision to enter social media was proposed by the Direct Channels and Innovation
Department. Despite this bottom up approach, not everyone is comfortable adapting to the new work
processes that become standard when social media is introduced as a companywide strategy. When
establishing new social marketing or CRM initiatives, companies across all industries face internal
resistance from employees who may not see the benefits of the
Second barrier – Internal resistance: projects, do not want to go through extra training, or do not want to
When establishing new social marketing change their established work flow processes. Some employees
or CRM initiatives, companies across all believe that a social initiative should only affect certain employees,
industries face internal resistance from such as the marketing team, and feel resentful when their daily
employees who may not see the benefits routine is affected. These employees may try to stop the initiatives
of the projects from going forward or may hinder their success by not adopting
the systems and new work processes. Social media in particular
can be seen by employees as something of a fad, or more youth oriented, and not appropriate for
well-established and regulated industries such as banking, which has a historically hermetic culture.
Furthermore, some banks will needs outside consulting on establishing a social strategy and
potential new hires or training for existing resources to managing the social media.
The key to facilitating adoption and breeding cultural change is to educate the employees on the
benefits of social initiatives. Training and nurturing internal advocates ensures that people do not feel
left out and understand exactly how, for example, Social CRM can benefit their department. As Berta
Sole, Marketing Director at Deutsche Bank Spain, describes, “We are just starting in social
networks but we have already carried a training plan for the marketing team, and before we launch
our first initiatives we will have to provide training to all the centralized services that will be involved,
the customer support department and other departments that will be content creators such as the
ones in charge of developing technical, investment and product reports. Up to now there have been
conferences and presentations in all levels of the organization about social media.” Another solution
would be to first try using an internal social network. In the case of Banco Sabadell, Pol Navarro,
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21. Head of Direct Channels and Innovation, explains that he believes the company went through a
cultural change after adopting social initiatives. “The perception that social media is entertainment
has changed to a feeling that it’s a mainstream solution here to stay, not only in our department but
also in other areas such as the board of directors, the marketing and communication units, et al.
When there’s a message the corporation wants to send, one of the first discussions is how to do so
through social media.”
14.3 Traditional transactional Systems
The third and final barrier involves the ability of the company to integrate their traditional transactional
systems (ERP and CRM) with social media initiatives. Core business process automation systems
are seeing a transition from being transactional systems to systems of engagement. This means that
the core business systems that currently exist in most financial
Third barrier – Traditional transaction enterprises are not enough. These core systems are slow. They
Systems: The third and final barrier allow only for low experimentation and are risk averse. Despite
involves the ability of the company to these drawbacks, the development of entirely new core systems is
integrate their traditional transactional not necessary. What is necessary is the development of a new set
systems (ERP and CRM) with social
of systems which Forrester calls, “the digital experience,” to work
media initiatives
hand in hand with the older core business systems. The two
systems’ life cycles become linked when digital experiences feed
transactions to the core business systems. These new systems are fast. They allow for frequent
changes and high experimentation. They emphasize content and are risk-tolerant. An example to
better illustrate this is that traditional core business systems do not take into account what customers
experience as a result of its processes. Running digital systems that can access data gathered
through the customer engagement process allows a more holistic approach to understanding the
customer.
15 Future Trends Involve Mobile Convergence and Big Data
Management
The two major trends in the future for the financial social media market will be: the integration of
social and mobile, and the opportunity to use the “big data” gathered through social media.
15.1 Integration of social and mobile
It is naive to examine the evolution in business processes that social technologies have brought by
disassociating it completely from the other big trend in banking and business: mobility. As social
technologies and technological devices such as smartphones and
Social and mobile are the two sides of tablets evolve, they bring us closer to a future where data, friends
engagement: social provides an and information are readily available anytime, anywhere. Juniper
opportunity for dialog while mobile
Research predicts that 1.3 billion consumers will rely on their
offers consistent access for such a
dialog to take place
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22. mobile devices to access social media sites by 2016. As described in Business Insider’s 2012 report,
The Mobile Industry: In-Depth, 600 million users are already accessing Facebook through mobile
and, in October 2012, the social network was adding 26,000 mobile users an hour.
Mobile social media offers a unique opportunity, not only to develop brand awareness, but to reward
consumers for desired behavior, such as bringing friends to a bank branch or becoming a loyal
customer. It also helps with contextualizing consumers buying behavior, as preferences, past buying
habits and tastes are exactly what consumers share through social networks and apps. Companies
such as MasterCard and American Express have already started running social mobile campaigns
by partnering with Facebook Places and Foursquare
respectively. American Express lets card members get
loyalty card-like credit when they check in on Foursquare.
Similarly, MasterCard rewards Facebook Places check-
ins. As more people begin to access social sites from the
mobile devices, it will become a new business creation
channel. When it comes to finance, the main direction in
which social commerce is going is towards mobile
payments. Banks have been increasingly broadening
their offerings for mobile banking products which are
moving from basic transfers and bill payment capabilities to P2P payments and mobile wallets.
Banks such as Barclays have already released apps that allow their clients to make mobile
payments.
Social and mobile are the two sides of engagement: social provides an opportunity for dialog while
mobile offers consistent access for such a dialog to take place. As one investment bank describes,
“It’s too hard to engage our CEO and CFO customers on their PCs. We need to be present on mobile
and tablets so our busy customers can engage with us on demand without having to be tied to their
desks.” Building relationships with customers requires not only access, but also conversation. Social
media tools like LinkedIn and private communities give interactive marketers the ability to act like
sales and account management teams by creating conversations with and between customers.
15.2 The “big data” opportunity
Aside from their use to conduct interactions and share information between users and companies,
social networks are becoming extensive libraries of information about content, profiles and
relationships. There is a vast amount of data generated by people
The convergence of Social Media and in social. According to late 2011 statistics published by IBM, the
the “big data” challenge represents massive adoption of Google, Facebook, Twitter and other services
huge opportunities for financial
has resulted in the generation of over 2.5 quintillion bytes each
institutions
day. For some perspective on how large this number is, experts
estimate that there are 7 quintillion grains of sand on earth. Thus,
social feeds Big Data allowing Big Data to enable companies to measure and manage their
businesses in ways never before possible.
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23. Big Data is not just about big volume, it also about velocity (how fast the data is coming and how
quickly one can crunch them – think 200 million+ tweets a day), value (understanding what really
matters), and variety (text, image, video, audio). Social data, for instance, consists of much more
than the posts. It includes timestamps, geotags, device types,
and more, and the data is of both the structured and unstructured
Big Data is not just about big volume,
variety. Early awareness of the need to support unstructured data
it also about velocity, value and
has been most acute in customer-facing organizations. Oracles
variety
CEO Ellison recently demonstrated how his company’s new
products analyzed nearly 5 billion Twitter posts to determine what
celebrity would be the best spokesperson to promote a new Lexus sedan. In the end, Oracle ended
up analyzing 27 billion relationships, nearly a billion retweets and hashtags, 2.8 billion mentions and
another 1.3 billion replies. And as Ellison pointed out, the conclusion itself -- that gold-medal Olympic
gymnast Gabby Douglas was the best fit to promote the new Lexus -- wasn't nearly as significant as
the process by which that conclusion was reached, which included drilling down into the data to find
out whose posts most frequently mentioned cars, for instance.
When it comes to finance, this new way to improve decision making simply should not be ignored.
Through understanding traveling and spending patterns and behaviors of customers by what they
share on public social media platforms, banks can develop better suited marketing and targeting
strategies. For example, a customer who publically posts a Facebook status saying he will spend two
weeks in New-York could be automatically sent a post asking if
When it comes to finance, this new this customer needs to activate his credit card in the US, if this is
way to improve decision making in the realm of financial regulations. In an innovative use of Big
simply should not be ignored Data in the banking industry, a US-based retail bank used EMC
Greenplum tool for market basket analysis and customer lifetime
value computations enabling user based recommendations. The bank enriches the data with
unstructured activity logs and uses the result to identify at-risk customers. Furthermore, examples
such as Social Network Analysis for fraud detection illustrate how the information existing in social
media can be extracted and utilized by companies. This technology analyzes the relationships of the
rich profiles embedded in Facebook to detect potential fraudulent relationships in, for example,
insurance claims. What if the claimer is related on a second degree to the doctor that did confirm his
medical need? The opportunity to extract meaningful information about trends and relationships is
there, but little exploited so far.
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24. 16 Appendix 1: Classification of Social Technologies
Capability Description Examples of Technologies
Identify / Connect Allow users to add, modify or access content Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn,
through the use and linking of rich profiles. Tuenti
The decision of one user to access one or
another network will depend on his or her
potential match with the ‘community profile’
Communicate / Discuss Enable direct unilateral or multilateral Skype, WebEx, Facebook
communication in real or differed time. messaging, Twitter, Blogs
Create & Share content Allow the creation of public files such as Social bookmarks, search
document, image or video files, as well as engines, tags, hashtags
their dynamic modification and the collection
and mining of collective knowledge through
forums, discussion boards and Wikis.
Review / Rate Allow users to share their opinions on Tripadvisor, Booking.com
products or services they have engaged with.
It is an increasing trend for this type of
interaction to be a key influencer in
purchasing behavior.
Play games Allow users to engage in games whilst Zynga Games (Farmville), Angry
remaining within the social portal has Birds
emerged. The gamification component is
increasingly being exploited too in the most
advanced cases of social CRM.
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25. Contact Person:
Miguel Reiser | Director Business Marketing | GFT Group
T +34 93 565 9100 | info@gft.com
Copyright © 2012 GFT Technologies AG. All rights reserved.
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