How do you segment financial services customers?

In an earlier post I made it clear that I thought a certain way of segmenting customers has had its day. The method of classifying customers just by their life stage is no longer relevant, with both lifestyles and finances having moved on.

So rather than dwelling on this, I thought it better to look at ways that banks in the future could segment their customers. But to be honest, I couldn’t come up with a single simple way of segmenting financial services customers that made sense in the modern world. Nothing really fitted nicely and any possible model had loads of exceptions to the rules.

And then it struck me... that perhaps there's no longer a few simple segments that fitted all financial services customers. Perhaps this subject is just too complex to put into simple terms... or in other words, perhaps now with the advert of clever data analysis and personalisation, there's no need to segment them into a handful of categories, everyone is in their own segment!

It's therefore my prediction that banks will eventually integrate big data analytics into their CRM systems. This will develop their understanding of who each individual customer is, alongside a record of what products and services they have already got do describe how best to meet their needs.

Some financial services companies may already be on their way to delivering this vision and this should be an interesting space to watch as the use of dig data analysis takes off.