I was struck by Jim Sinur’s latest post about how far “customer control” in B2C relationships has yet to run. Jim talks about how a bank decided to change its policy on overdrafts from:
- accepting payment events on overdrawn accounts, hence increasing charges
to:
- refusing payment events that would make an account overdrawn
This struck me as odd. Surely, if banks have controls like this (and they do), then they can have account settings to allow either of these options, to suit either the individual (or the bank!).
Better still, they could allow the adjustment of event controls to suit the individual and their needs. This is what personalization is about. I should be able to specify whether the bank lets me go overdrawn for payment events based on payee, timing, and so forth… The bank might want to monitor my income spending profile and make suggestions (or specify defaults) to account settings and behaviors. For example if it detects my income changes then it might suggest, or set defaults to, rules / service levels that have suited similar customers.
Compare and contrast to current bank accounts, where occasional (but seemingly regular) marketing initiatives “invent” new banking “packages” providing certain services and entitlements (such as low cost insurance, discounted overdraft facility, credit balance interest rates etc).
Bank IT departments might complain however that their mainframe batch operations cannot possible handle individual business rules for each user. To do that they might need to move to… event-by-event processing, using something that can join customer parameters with customer transaction events… like an event-driven rule engine, perhaps? Possibly some banks are already moving in this “event-driven process” direction…
