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Find out more How Vanquis turned customer insights into business impact
Overview: Vanquis boosts direct debit instructions by 59.2%
How Vanquis improved targeting and personalisation, and increased Direct Debit instructions by 59.2%
Consumers are facing rising costs and tougher financial choices, leading to greater financial awareness and more deliberate decisions about how they spend and manage their money. This creates a pivotal opportunity for banks to strengthen relationships at every interaction and reinforce customer confidence.
In this environment, having a clear and consistent understanding of customers, who they are, what matters to them and what influences their decisions, is more valuable than ever. With the right insights, banks can deliver more relevant experiences, improve targeting and enable faster, more confident decision-making.
An insight-led customer strategy allows banks to stay closely aligned with evolving needs, direct investment more effectively and build lasting loyalty at the moments that matter most.
Challenge overview
Fragmented understanding of customer needs.
Different teams saw customers through different lenses, segmentations, internal models, product data, or assumptions, making it harder to act decisively across the lifecycle. This slowed alignment and created unclear priorities.
Internal assumptions that didn’t reflect real customer context.
Internal data reflected account behaviour but not the wider household, lifestyle or financial context shaping customer behaviours – increasing the risk of mis-targeted propositions and communications.
Hard to personalise engagement with confidence.
Lacking behavioural and lifestyle insight, teams couldn’t tailor messages with certainty. This reduced the impact of Direct Debit activation campaigns and made it harder to prepare personalised communications ahead of the mobile‑app launch – where relevance would be critical to driving uptake.
Limited clarity on complaint drivers.
Product and service data highlighted where issues occurred and which customers were driving complaint spikes, but not why. Lacking broader customer context such as life stage, expectations and digital behaviour made it difficult to separate surface issues from systemic ones – slowing decisions on where to intervene.
Media spend at risk without strong geo-level insights
Selecting locations for outdoor or brand activations relied on broad assumptions rather than evidence. Without a clear view of where priority cohorts were most concentrated, media decisions would involve guesswork – risking wasted spend and potential missed opportunities.
View Vanquis Profile
Company Bio:
Vanquis is the UK’s largest specialist finance provider for financially underserved customers, serving more than 1.7 million people through its core banking services and Snoop. Many customers manage tight budgets and rely on Vanquis for everyday financial stability.
The bank’s purpose, delivering caring banking so our customers can make the most of life’s opportunities, depends on a deep understanding their customers, the pressures they face and what drives their choices. That insight helps teams move at pace, build trust at every interaction and deliver sustainable commercial impact, while supporting financial inclusion and social mobility.
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| Founded: | 1880 |
| UK Customers: | Over 1.7 million |
Our strategy has shifted from building products for customers to creating experiences around them. Trusted customer insight has given us the confidence to challenge assumptions, align teams around a single view of the customer, and make better decisions across the lifecycle - from targeting and engagement through to experience design. Customer insight has helped us better understand who our customers are, where they are in their journey and how best to support them.
Solution overview
Vanquis used trusted insight from Experian’s financial segmentation to help them build one customer view across the organisation. By enriching first‑party data with independent insight into financial attitudes, behaviours and life stage, teams were able to move beyond what customers did to understand who they were and why.
This unified understanding across senior leadership and technical teams enabled stronger decisions, clearer targeting, and more confident personalisation at every stage of the lifecycle.
Use Case 1: Smarter OOH brand activations
Vanquis used geo-level segmentation to identify postcode hotspots for core customer segments so they could direct rebrand activity to high‑value locations. This insight shifted media planning from assumption-based decisions to evidence-based placement. With renewed confidence in their media placement, Vanquis launched a brand campaign deploying transit-based OOH creative, specifically bus advertising.
Use Case 2: Confident personalisation of Direct Debit messaging
With deep insight into life stage, affluence, financial attitudes and channel behaviours, Vanquis were able to tailor campaign messaging for each Mosaic Financial Type. This clarity removed guesswork and gave teams the confidence to shape the tone and content across direct channels. Direct Debit activations were the first direct mail campaigns tested, with new copy and creative aligned to segment insights.
Use Case 3: Clearer understanding of complaint drivers.
Analysing complaints against Mosaic Financial allowed Vanquis to challenge assumptions on those who were struggling. The data highlighted that pockets of both affluent and cost‑conscious older customers needed more support, clearer guidance, and simpler digital journeys. This insight helped teams prioritise experience improvements more effectively.
Vanquis moved from assumption-led decisions to a single, trusted customer view - enabling smarter targeting, more personalised experiences, faster cross-team decisions, and stronger customer outcomes.
See how financial segmentation works Results
- Smarter targeting for stronger OOH impact
- Personalised journeys to drive more conversions
- One trusted view to power faster decisions
Solutions
How Vanquis transformed direct debit uptake through smarter customer insight
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