“We are able to access 100 percent of our customers instantly by
e-mail at their mobile terminals.”
—Takeo Tohara, President and CEO, Jibun Bank
And Jibun Bank is looking to take advantage of this competitive differentiator. For example, exchange rates can impact the
length of time it takes to open a foreign exchange account. If
the yen is appreciated, the process can take a while to complete.
Or a customer, looking to open an account after hours via PC,
may not like the currency rate available at that time. Jibun Bank
allows customers to set a target rate of exchange—for example,
¥92 and US$1. Once that target rate is hit, the customer
receives an e-mail notification and can open the account in two
or three touches over the mobile terminal. “So, although we
provide the same instruments as conventional banks, we have
been creative, and the ways the customer can use and leverage
these instruments is quite different,” says Tohara.
Jibun Bank is also leveraging information about the gender
mix of its account holders. “The ratio
among internet banking users is 80
percent male, 20 percent female, but
mobile phone use is split 50-50, and
we are seeing that as well at Jibun Bank,
which means we are getting much more
support from female users. This has been
a natural result, but we are now positioning females as a very important customer
segment and trying to provide specific
measures going forward.” Bank management has learned, for example, that the
timed deposit, or cumulative deposit,
rate is much higher for women than for men, especially among
women in their 30s. The conclusion, says Tohara, is that women
are likely to want a fixed rate for their savings, while men are
more likely to prefer a floating rate. That insight also suggests
opportunities for a marketing campaign targeting women that
offers an additional interest rate during the campaign period.
plicated interface. “In comparison with the PC, of course, the
screen size is much smaller with mobile terminals, but the size
of the screens has been getting larger, and we have been quite
creative about how we design the screen itself,” says Tohara.
“When banks start from the PC screen, users find it incon-
venient,” notes Masahiro Ikedate, chief executive of Jibun
Bank’s Systems Unit. “We started with the mobile terminal
and designed the screen to be easy to read and operate from
a mobile standpoint. KDDI had applications already function-
ing in mobile terminals, and we tried to emulate those exist-
ing applications. What’s important here is to provide screens
that are fun to use.” Customers can complete most Jibun Bank
transactions with one or two clicks, while mobile transactions
through traditional banks typically require five or six clicks to
complete the same operation.
An example of an appealing interface, Ikedate says, is Jibun Bank’s savings
program. Customers can set a target for
the amount they want to save and how
quickly they want to achieve that goal,
choose an icon that indicates the reason
they’re saving, and then track their progress on a colorful bar graph on their
mobile phone screen. The result of such
efforts is that 90 percent of Jibun Bank
transactions occur via the customer’s
mobile phone, a penetration level that
surprises even Tohara.
Besides adding pizzazz to the transaction interface, Jibun
Bank has used two primary strategies to motivate customers.
One involves periodic promotional campaigns offering a financial incentive of ¥ 1,500 (at a maximum), or the equivalent of
US$16, for opening a new account. The other relies on affinity marketing, such as offering free account transfers to other
Jibun Bank accounts or customers of KDDI’s au mobile service.
Targeted advertising is also helping motivate customers to try
Jibun Bank. “We need to let them try it. Otherwise, they will
never experience how easy it is to use,” says Ikedate. “We are
advertising to known mobile users, and as we increase the
number of users, there will be some word of mouth as well.”
Security issues were resolved in a number of ways that go
beyond the standard firewalls and other security and regulatory
practices followed by credible financial institutions. Each Jibun
Bank account is assigned to a unique mobile phone number and
cannot be accessed from any other mobile phone. Customers
can lock their account’s ATM function with a couple of clicks
on their cell phone, so ATM withdrawals can be limited or pro-
>>SNAPSHOT
Jibun Bank
www.jibunbank.co.jp
Headquarters: Tokyo, Japan
Employees: 79
Accounts: 495,000
Balance: ¥71,592,000,000 (as of
March 31, 2009)
Oracle products: Oracle FLEXCUBE
applications
REACHING NEW MARKETS
“Japan is quite like the U.S. in that there’s very little customer
loyalty to a particular financial institution,” says Neil Katkov,
senior vice president at global financial services consulting firm
Celent. “Very little customer loyalty creates a lower barrier to
adopting a new banking service. It creates a good market landscape for a new bank.”
According to Celent, internet banking had a penetration of
10. 2 percent or 3 million users in 2008. That compares with
1 percent or 1. 3 million mobile banking users. In surveying
banking customers throughout the Japanese market, Jibun Bank
learned that obstacles included a lack of a specific reason to use
the service, unease about security, poor legibility, and a com-
