The cost savings of online marketing over direct mail may not be as big as you think.
Acquisition budgets have been migrating online for a number of years now. Double digit year on year growth, relatively cheap media and real time optimisation have made the transition somewhat inevitable. Certainly I was one of those quick to prophesise the demise of offline channels like direct mail.
Despite recent coverage of the US elections virtually eclipsing the issue of online gaming, moves towards it were quietly progressing behind the scenes.
Nevada, closely followed by Delaware, have now approved the nation’s first interactive gambling licenses, while in August the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of New York determined that Hold ‘em Poker was not actually ‘gambling’, instead ruling it a game of skill and expertise.
The financial services sector currently shoulders the £3.5 billion lion’s share of the UK’s annual £75 billion estimated fraud losses.
Mortgages, currents accounts, loans and savings are all vulnerable – but evidence suggests pensions are equally at risk.
While there are no precise figures for Britain’s pensions industry as a whole, annual public sector pension fraud alone is estimated to cost nearly £17 million by the National Fraud Authority.
European businesses risk losing billions of Euros as a result of failure to tackle simple payment errors according to a new Experian report.
The switch to a single SEPA payment system – designed to simplify and streamline processing operations for domestic and international payments – will expose out-of-date account data and other errors that were previously overcome through a patchwork of locally implemented fixes.
Microsoft has opted for Experian’s Bank Wizard Global to handle accurate and timely commission payments to Microsoft Corp.’s international network of re-sellers and supply vendors.
Under new Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) rules, the use of the International Bank Account Number (IBAN) to uniquely identify the bank and account of payment beneficiaries will soon become mandatory for all internatonal and domestic euro payments.
Just in case you’ve been in a cave for the past two months, the festive shopping season is now almost here with the UK’s first big seasonal spike in online shopping fast approaching. So-called Cyber Monday traditionally falls on the first Monday of December.
And this year’s online landmark lands on December3.
Experian has announced a renewal of its strategic partnership with Hitachi Capital UK, continuing to provide a range of acquisition credit risk, customer management, affordability and ID verification products.
Hitachi Capital UK operates extensively in the retail finance sector and has opted to extend its use of Experian’s Detect and Hunter fraud prevention services, improving its control of credit and fraud risk and the efficiency of its application processing.
Make sure your segmentation is actionable.
Having worked in the customer insight world for much longer than I care to remember I am still amazed by a recurring and underlying issue when it comes to planning market segmentation projects.
In the hope of strengthening customer relationships before the next market boom, many lenders have taken a proactive approach to dealing with customers struggling under the backlash of the recession, offering leniency on payment terms and allowing payment holidays.
As the economy fluctuates between contraction and growth, those businesses getting ready for the latter must prepare to face a new set of challenges. In the past, the volume of sales coming in meant businesses could absorb a certain amount of bad debt without cause for concern and credit departments were forced to absorb this debt in the name of ‘growth’. Today, even a little bad debt can cause big problems.
