Financial services institutions’ success depends significantly on their ability to develop sophisticated customer management strategies—including acquisition, retention, pricing, and risk—that maximize profitability without undue risk-taking. Best practices today call for data-driven, fact-based decision-making. Despite acute awareness of their own data and performance, banks face challenges in understanding their performance in relation to the competitive environment.
In 1997 Argus launched its Syndicated Studies solution, which includes several industry-wide panels that provide a unique external perspective by compiling and reporting behavior, risk, and pricing data across competitors. Participants leverage Syndicated Studies to achieve insight into the competitive dynamics of the payments industry, enabling them to make informed decisions and to identify opportunities to improve their performance.
Unlike other sources of competitive information, Argus’s studies are based on account-level transactional data provided directly from participating banks and do not rely on self-reported information. Today most leading financial institutions in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada participate in Argus’s studies, ensuring that benchmarking results accurately reflect the competitive landscape.
Argus’s Syndicated Studies are particularly compelling to their participants as the dynamic dataset allows for bespoke querying to answer specific questions. Participants have access to nearly 15 years of data, which contains transactional details for hundreds of millions of depersonalized accounts. By leveraging the account-level data provided by each participant, benchmarks are customized to match a bank’s marketing and segmentation strategies. In this manner, Argus ensures that comparisons are fair and relevant and avoid risks associated with typical “industry-level” comparisons.
Argus’s approach to benchmarking is pragmatic and focused on identifying opportunities and actions that will translate to bottom-line impact. Argus’s current Syndicated Study offerings include:
Credit Card Payments Study – the industry standard that provides issuers with a comprehensive understanding of the credit card market
Small Business Card Study – a study that delivers benchmarking data for small business card issuers
Private Label Card Study – Argus has partnered with multiple card issuers to create a study that specifically focuses on issuers’ Private Label card portfolios
Deposit Account Payments Study – studies that provides retail banks with a comprehensive understanding of transactional deposit account payment behavior