How Nationwide developed an understanding of individual members

The Challenge

After the banking crisis, Nationwide Building Society wanted to engage with customers and underline its status as a mutual building society. Unlike the big banks, Nationwide is owned by its members and the business model is built on trust and a deep understanding of its customers. This makes it all the more important to respond to their changing needs.

In an increasingly complex financial services environment, developing a common understanding of their customers across the entire online and offline business has been recognised as key.

The Solution

The Society approached CACI to undertake a major segmentation exercise across their entire consumer database. This exercise focussed on developing pen portraits of key customers segments, focussing not only on life-stage but also incorporating other dimensions that were relevant to the business, such as affluence, channel behaviour and attitudes.

CACI conducted workshops with key stakeholders across marketing, products and channel management. Models were developed which brought together both Nationwide and CACI’s own datasets (Ocean and Fresco), so that customers could be coded with both an overall life-stage score and a range of dimension scores. The data was pulled together to create a set of pen portraits covering the entire financial services marketplace and Nationwide’s customers within that.

The Results

Nationwide Building Society is now able to understand their individual members at a glance, and offer them the right products, services and advice to help them with their banking needs. This new toolset helps Nationwide to understand its customers’ needs, and develop compelling, targeted products, services and marketing messages and has won Nationwide significant new business among younger members.