Wang Pilgrim Bank Case Study

ASSIGNMENT: BUS253a, Marketing Research. Wang Pilgrim Bank

*How do retail banks make money from their customers? How do

retail banks deal with variation in profitability across customers?

*Based on sample of customer profitability for 1999, what can Green

conclude about the profitability for PilgramBank's entire customer

population?

*Run following two regression analysis on consumers with complete

records and interpret the results:

a). use Profit as dependent variable,

and Online as independent

variable. What do you find?

b). use Profit as dependent variable,

Online and demographics

as independent variables, what do you find?

How would you compare this with first regression?

*You may wonder if there is any systematic difference between

consumers with complete demographic records and those who

don't. Think of a proper method and see what you find.

*Based on analysis results, what strategies would you recommend?

Pilgrim Bank is a retail bank, that is in business to make money by performing a service in exchange for money. The relationship between the bank and the customer is symbiotic; each is dependent on the other. Profitability is determined on financial as well as operational management by 1) the level of passive revenue generated through invesment income on deposit balances; 2) fee based income; and 3) loan interest income. Determining the profitability of the average customer however is not a simple task, since the correlation between a customer's bank balance and profitability appears to be skewed. Analysis of profitability of customers shows that 10% of the customers generated 70% of the profits. In other words, the customer(s) with fewer personal transactions was more profitable than the labor intensive customer, regardless of the maintained balance. Pilgrim must decide: 1) which customers are profitable and 2) what to do with the unprofitable customers.

Additional channels add cost to the bank in terms of capital investment. Pilgrim wants to encourage high cost low margin customers to migrate to online banking, yet the dilemma is whether to charge for the service to cover costs or to reward the customer to do so without charge. Regardless of the migrating

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