Allica Bank’s Conrad Ford Reveals How Banks Can Provide A Personalised Service To Customers

Conrad Ford, Chief Product & Strategy Officer at Allica Bank, sits down with Ali Paterson to discuss the challenges of providing a truly personalised service to consumers in an era when customer demands & expectations are becoming ever-more specific and varied. “When people talk about personalization, everybody agrees that personalization is better. So that’s not really the question. We would all love to give as personal as a service as possible to our customers. The real challenge is, how do you do that without the economics of serving the customers breaking down? I think in the medium-sized business segment, or what we at Allica would call established SMEs, that’s really been that pattern that’s happened over the last 10-20 years.” “Which is the big banks have actually retrenched very heavily from serving those customers, and there’s a kind of underlying structural reason for that. So, medium-sized businesses are quite awkward for the big banks because they sit awkwardly between the middle of the 2 big areas where the banks make money.”