At the end of last year,
Citigroup head-hunted Tracey Weber from bookseller Barnes &
Noble to take over as managing director of internet and mobile for
its North America consumer banking division. The brief: to help
Citigroup to become the premier digital retail bank in the US.
Douglas Blakey reports.
Go deeper with GlobalData
Towards the end of
2010, Citigroup made a significant hire. It brought in Tracey Weber
from Barnes & Noble and the former North American president of
Travelocity, the online reservations business, with the aim of
beefing up its digital banking proposition.
Weber now reports to Citi’s chief
marketing officer Michelle Peluso and leads all strategy and
execution for Citi’s card, retail and personal wealth management
internet and mobile offerings.
With analysts forecasting that more
than one-half of US adults will own a smartphone by the end of this
year, the ability to offer a compelling mobile banking service has
become increasingly important for the major US banks.
While Citi was an early advocate of
mobile banking, it has continued to trail behind rival Bank of
America’s (BofA) sector-leading mobile banking customer
numbers.
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By GlobalDataWithin a year of the banks
launching their respective m-banking offerings in the summer of
2008, BofA had signed up one million customers; by contrast, Citi
had at that stage signed up only 20,000 customers.
Fast forward to last year and
BofA’s m-banking numbers have exceeded 4 million while Wells Fargo
and JPMorgan Chase had around 3.4 million and two million
m-banking customers respectively.
In stark contrast, Citi’s total
m-banking customers stand shy of hitting the one million mark with
an estimated 800,000 users.
Weber told RBI: “Current
m-banking numbers remains commercially sensitive. At Citi, we are
focused on offering distribution tools for customers regardless of
where they are from a servicing perspective.”
In other areas of digital
communication, Weber has not been slow to drive forward
innovation.
Citi’s latest mobile advancements
include:
- @AskCiti: A 24 hour customer
service offering via Twitter that is now the first contact us
option offered to mobile banking users; - Mobile Twitter Mash-Up:
allowing consumers to view the @AskCiti feed
and Tweet for help directly from the bank mobile site;
and - Citi’s Mobile Showcase:
Weber said that it is the first comprehensive showcase of mobile
banking services on offer to mobile users from any US
bank.
Weber confirmed US press reports
that Citi has assigned and trained around 100 staff to deal with
queries via Twitter, flagging-up the significance of the initiative
for the lender.
Twitter has been verifying accounts
– a symbol of credibility and stamp of authenticity most commonly
associated with celebrity accounts – of an increasing number of
banks with BofA and Citi two of the first to sign up.
Citi has also been using twitter to
promote money-saving deals on shopping and travel for Citi credit
card members and Citibank Debit MasterCard customers.
But at the end of April, Citi’s
followers on Twitter continue to trail its major US retail banking
rivals, with 6,026 following @askCiti. By contrast, Wachovia and
Wells Fargo had 8,599 and 6,976 followers respectively;
@ChaseGiving had 10,985 followers while @BofA_Help had 9,998.
American Express became the first financial services firm to
break the 100,000 follower mark on twitter; it has two accounts
(one focused on B2C, the other on B2B) and had 131,963 followers as
of 27 April.
