Retail
Strategy
Retail’s strategy is focused on creating shareholder value by delivering superior customer value across a broad spectrum of products and distribution channels. We offer our customers easy to understand, competitively priced and straightforward products which, combined with a rigorous approach to cost control and risk management, enable us to convert carefully selected growth in sales into long-term growth in shareholder value.
We believe that our uniquely strong sales and distribution model will allow us to grow profitable market shares of between 15% and 20% in the core markets in which we operate. Our approach is based on offering customers better value products, providing them with excellent service levels and ensuring we treat them fairly.
Utilising our multi-branded product range and broad distribution model we will:
Grow profitable market share through offering good value products that attract new customers and encouraging existing customers to increase their product holdings with us
It is our aim to ensure that we remain at the forefront in banking by continually challenging the traditional high street banks and growing our market share in this segment. Business Banking also offers substantial opportunities for profitable growth and we aim to grow the market shares and profits in this business.
As well as attracting new customers with innovative and value adding products, we aim to maintain long-term relationships with our customers and meet a greater share of their financial needs. We will achieve this through providing excellent service, offering additional products that are more effectively targeted to meet customer needs and providing extra value that recognises the customer relationship with us.
Target growth that achieves the right balance between risk and reward
We carefully judge the appropriate pace of growth in different markets according to prevailing conditions and our expectations of how they will evolve. We continually re-evaluate our credit risk underwriting criteria and have, where necessary, made refinements to our credit scoring techniques and methods to ensure that the level of risk we are accepting on to our balance sheet is commensurately priced for and that we attain the appropriate level of return for the risk being underwritten.
Provide consistently good customer service
Our objective in this respect is to improve our customer ratings for satisfaction with our service compared to our banking peers. We achieve this by improving the day-to-day interactions between our colleagues and customers, by streamlining our processes and by introducing new services to meet customer needs. We measure our relative performance through a telephone survey of our customers and those of our banking peers administered by an independent research agency.
Keep tight control of costs
Our credentials in respect of cost control within Retail are now well established. Our aim is to continue to control costs, allowing us to absorb business volume growth, whilst at the same time investing in initiatives aimed at generating future revenue growth and further reducing our cost:income ratio.