Relationship marketing in the banking sector: the impact of new technologies

Having finally embraced the concept of marketing, banks enter the new millennium in a increasingly competitive and fragmented marketplace, consisting of financially literate consumers and direct low cost competition from recognised high street brand names. As customers increasingly interact with banks through remote technological channels (e.g. phone, Internet, etc.) the implications for bank‐customer relationships are important. This paper, accordingly, reports on an international research study which explored the perceptions of senior bankers in the UK, Sweden and the USA with regard to the use of the Internet as a relationship marketing tool. There was unanimous agreement that the Internet had a key role to play in relationship management but there was far less agreement about the rates of customer adoption and the extent to which this could or should be influenced by bank strategies.