How Standard Chartered Bank serves customers better by taking a 360° view of them

This geek has been following with increasing interest how banks operating in Singapore are innovating to better serve their customers in this day and age. From OCBC’s credit cards with personalized designs, UOB’s mobile cash (Barclay’s just announced their mobile cash service this week too), banks like Standard Charter Bank (SCB) have been innovating hard to improve their offerings.

They’ve recently well-received Breeze iOS app, which unfortunately cannot be used by corporate customers, and announced a 1.88 percent per annum return on your current account up to a maximum of S$25,000,  under the Bonus$aver‘s scheme.

That is substantial, especially in a time where local interest rates are much lower (you can check how SIBOR rates have dropped over here). This geek was curious to find the catch.

The catch, it appears, is that you have to spend S$500 a month on your credit card. Ah… smart of SCB to bundle your current account and credit card together and offer you higher interest rates. But what if you don’t actually qualify for a credit card? This is where it gets more interesting. You can do the same with your debit card.

Now I think I understand how they can use what they make from your credit card to give you higher returns on your savings. But for a debit card where you don’t actually pay interest? We can do detective work whole day on how SCB managed to achieve this rate or return and still not get it right. So what did SCB have to say about this?

According to a representative from the bank’s retail division, SCB managed to achieve this rate of return by deriving the synergies from your holistic relationship with the bank across a few product lines.

In other words, by taking a 360 perspective of you as a customer, instead of rewarding you with a few pennies for opening a bank account and another few pennies for taking up a credit card, they look at your relationship with the bank across product lines and consolidate your rewards, resulting in S$495 interest earnings on a S$50,000 current account balance (with S$500 a month spend) over 12 months.

I’m quite sure no other banks in Singapore offer this rate of return on my current account at the moment.

Pretty smart and-well executed, for an organization as large as SCB. Hopefully this will give you something to think about in improving how you reward your customers today.

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