Banks are ramping up their efforts in a bid to attract and retain customers.

If you take a look down the high street or online, you’ll see endless above-the-line marketing doing its best to get your attention.

However, most propositions are product-specific, with little regard for building long-lasting relationships with customers – relationships that might consider rewarding customers for a particular behavior, or for more than simply using one specific product.

To extend customer rewards beyond product use, retail banks need to recreate the way in which they interact and communicate with their customers. Whether it’s rewarding customers for something simple like switching to paperless statements, or acknowledging a shift in positive behavior, there are opportunities to develop powerful connections with customers that will be rewarding for banks and customers alike.

Bank-wide loyalty is a massive opportunity for banks to differentiate themselves from the competition and eventually generate more revenue. Understanding and rewarding customers at every stage of the relationship is key. Through an open, honest and dynamic dialogue, banks can give customers the attention they deserve. By doing so, brand loyalty can be further enhanced, where the customer’s relationship is directly with the bank, not a single banking product.

There’s no silver bullet. With disjointed legacy systems still commonplace in banking, it’s difficult for banks to have a holistic view of their customers. But to remain competitive, banks need to innovate and introduce new bank-wide loyalty schemes – only then can they focus on customers as individuals, and deliver a meaningful and rewarding experience for everyone.

Some banks have attempted to expand their loyalty schemes into other product areas as well, but there’s still a gap – banks need to start treating customers as unique individuals in order to become more relevant and appeal to them throughout their journey with the bank.

Could the era of product-centric loyalty schemes be coming to an end? We hope to see banks move to a new and promising customer-centric approach, where loyalty revolves around the individual and their unique needs and not just simply reward the accumulation of banking products.