The Key Challenges For The Banking And Travel Sectors?

What’s your role at Consumer Intelligence?

As Key Account Director for the financial services division my role includes relationship management on key accounts, developing new business opportunities across both banking and travel sectors, introducing Consumer Intelligence and its capabilities to new markets, channels and services and developing the longer term business strategy.

Before joining Consumer Intelligence my roles included Head Of Accounts for MasterCard Prepaid (APW) and Head of Sales for IMX software, a leading provider in Retail and Wholesale banknote solutions.

What are the key challenges for the banking and travel sectors?

The travel money market is an extremely competitive market where banks, travel agents, post offices, Bureau de Changes and online boutique services continuously ‘lock horns’ trying to offer the best service with the best returns. Location, product and demographics all influence what the end customer will receive and depending on where, when or what you transact, the customer can often be the most unfortunate individual within the process.

Some travel money organisations use locations (airports and tourist attractions) as a reason to drive up rates and fees in order to cover operational costs whilst others attract consumers by displaying preferential rates drawing the customer in with the hope of ‘best rates on the high-street’ only to find that these so called ‘best rates’ can only be gained with values of £600 or more.

Consumers are naturally becoming less trustworthy of the travel money market and often turning to plastic as the convenient and alternative foreign payment.

How have you worked with customers to address challenges?

Consumer Intelligence was recently asked to help a well-known high street brand review its travel money pricing across online, phone and in branch.

Its goal was to differentiate itself from high street competitors by offering the same competitive rate regardless of the channel.

We started by looking at the experience from a consumer’s perspective.

• Step 1 - Perform mystery shopping across the top 20 high street providers. This was performed over aselect number of cities, dates and times to ascertain any rate variants applied by competitors.
• Step 2 - Consumer Intelligence benchmarked the top 20 high street providers over a set duration. Thousands of records were collated to assist in assessing competitor activity across a set duration
• Step 3 - Telephone ‘Mystery Shopping’ to confirm the results of steps one and two
• Step 4 - Analysis and report generation, outlining competitor activity and price structure.

Data in hand, we worked with the client to develop an independently endorsed message to use in customer marketing, promising that they are treated fairly and equally wherever they live and whatever sales channel they transact through.

We continue to monitor and benchmark rates and work with the brand to react accordingly. 

Travel money: how Britain buys travel money

Consumer Intelligence’s biannual travel money survey reveals a detailed picture of the UK travel money market. Our last survey involved 1,096 online interviews in October 2017. Here are some highlights.

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