Industry Feedback on DS in European Banking Sector

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The Ryan Report “Digital Signage in Retail Financial Services: A Survey of Leading European Banks” is a survey conducted with over 60 leading European and South African banks representing 44,000 branches across 23 countries. Marketing and retail executives from each bank were questioned in detail on the role of the branch, POS strategies and their experiences with and attitudes to digital signage.
 
The recent survey into the use of digital signage in retail banking carried out by John Ryan, a Retail Marketing Agency, had three central objectives: to understand how European banks are using POS marketing techniques to achieve business objectives, to understand the role that digital signage is playing today and is expected to play in the future, and to highlight the challenges and opportunities faced by those who have already deployed digital signage.
 
Whatever else was evident, the survey demonstrated that the branch channel remains crucial, despite the growth of other banking channels. Respondents indicated that the branch channel is responsible for as much as 99% of all retail sales. Digital signage in bank branches is, at least in part, driven by the fact that often the most effective and cost-efficient marketing a bank can implement is to target its existing customer base with a cross section of their banking services. Digital signage was also found to be a useful tool in queue-management.
 

One of the key challenges faced in branch marketing is how to achieve cross-sales targets while maintaining a good customer experience. POS advertising was viewed as a core component to banks’ marketing programmes as a tool to increase product awareness, support branch staff and contribute towards branding consistency. More than two-thirds of respondents believe digital signage can have a positive impact on retail marketing. They characterised digital signage as a tool with “huge potential”, “essential” and even “inevitable”. With half of respondents describing digital signage as a “utility” rather than a differentiator, it is clear that digital signage is going to make itself more and more at home in the branch.
 
The key findings of this survey showed that the adoption of digital signage in the banking sector is flourishing, with eight out of ten respondents expecting its use to become widespread in the coming years. In fact, the majority of respondents had already piloted digital signage in one form or another and, of these, two out of three are likely to or intend to make a further rollout. Furthermore, the majority of those who have not yet piloted digital signage actually intend to do so in the next year.
 
Adoption of digital signage was usually motivated by a variety of factors, though most responses were related either to improving the effectiveness of POS marketing communication or improving the branch experience.
 
Early adopters of digital signage declared that they encountered three main frustrations: firstly, the difficulty in keeping content fresh and interesting; secondly, problems garnering IT resource support; and thirdly, the lack of ease of message localisation.
 
 
Pilot tests were deemed highly useful to banks as they often realised that they had more requirements than they originally envisioned, such as web accessible control tools and message localisation features in their content management platforms. Both quantitative and qualitative performance measures were used to evaluate the success of their POS marketing, from a focus on sales results to exit interviews and customer surveys.
 
Two thirds of respondents used external agencies to produce content, but more than half of respondents deployed at least some messages that made use of assets originally developed for another purpose, such as video spots, video clips, Flash content from their website or images. Over half of the banks engaged in pilots or roll-outs attempted to target content differentially to pre-established groups of branches, often based on geographic criteria. Most respondents used their bank’s network to distribute content, with a few using CDs and only one updating by satellite.
 
The main problems they found with producing and managing content was getting impactful and good content on the screen, producing dynamic and locally relevant messaging, making it interactive, and a lack of flexibility. There remains some difficulty in proving an investment case to obtain internal support for further deployment.
 
In this survey, John Ryan further offered a few useful tips on how to achieve good content, such as repurposing content from other media, intelligent messaging, making full use of templates, adding viewer-generated interactive content, and using intelligent playlists. They tagged key areas to discuss when considering a digital signage installation as the messaging strategy (topical focus, execution, relevance to local viewers, frequency of updates, external data feeds), display strategy (location in the branch, display format, communications strategy) and daily management tools (localisation, updates, workflow management).
 
Bob Steele, Vice Chairman of John Ryan, summarised, “It is clear that the medium is taking hold and being adopted rapidly by European banks, with eight in ten respondents anticipating widespread use in the coming years. At the same time, early adopters of digital signage are reporting difficulties in creating, localising and managing content. They are finding that the very promise of this medium – the ability to target messaging to specific branches and screens – is far more laborious than expected.”