Retail Banking Market Research in Poland
We conducted the study Retail banking in Poland 2016 from September to December 2016 on a representative group of respondents: 4 focus groups, 10 in-depth interviews and n=600 online interviews.
The aim of the study was analysis of the services for retail banks customers, research of the most popular retail banks among Polish customers and customers’ expectations.
Retail banking is typical mass market banking where individual customers use local branches of larger commercial banks. Services offered include: savings and checking accounts, mortgages, personal loans, debit cards, credit cards and so on. Retail banking refers to banking in which banking institutions execute transactions directly with consumers, rather than corporations and entities, focused towards mass market segment covering a large population of individuals.
In 2016, the efforts in the Retail Banking segment in Poland were in large part focused on a better understanding of clients’ needs. Such an approach to building customer relationships produced tangible results, including client acquisition.
Customer service should be at best among all in retail banking. Someone has rightly said, “It takes months to find a good customer but only seconds to lose one.” Thus, strategy of knowing your customer is important. So the banks are required to adopt innovative strategies to meet customer’s needs and requirements in terms of services/products etc.
The dependency on technology has brought IT departments’ additional responsibilities and challenges in managing, maintaining and optimizing the performance of retail banking networks. It is equally important that banks should maintain security to the advance level to keep the faith of the customer.
Today’s retail banking industry in Poland is in crisis the symptoms can be ticked off like : lack of market growth, shrinking revenue pools, uncertain long term liquidity, huge loan losses, tightening regulation and sluggish value creation.
The economic fundamentals of the banking business are changing. Not only are deposits margins being squeezed by low rates, but the ability of banks to recover is being compromised by hyper competition for and pressure from regulators on fees. As a result the profitability is getting difficult.