1. Introduction

National Australia Bank, one of the ‘big four’ banks in Australia, engaged ECAL to test how payment reminders in the calendar stack up against SMS reminders.

Consumers find it very difficult to stay on top of their monthly credit card payments. They want an easy way to manage payments, and want to avoid ‘late fees’. Late payments also significantly affect your credit rating.

For banks, the cost of ‘bill chasing’ is a significant expense, so they want to avoid payments going into ‘collections’. More on-time payments means a reduction in costs associated with ‘collections’ activities and customer service call handling.

It also helps the drive to ‘paperless’ and keeps their customers happy – which is a vitally important success metric for banks.

2. Objectives

• Test customer interest in a calendar reminder feature
• Test effectiveness of calendar reminders against SMS reminders
• Increase on-time payments by min. 2% (compared with SMS reminders)

3. Strategy

The project would target a cohort of bank customers who were prone to payment default and prone to entering ‘collections’. For the sake of the test, customers would receive an SMS with a feature link to sync payment reminders to their mobile calendar.

NB: In a full integrated rollout, the feature is integrated into the mobile banking app, and online banking portal.

4. Solutions

Participating NAB customers received two entries in their calendar for their upcoming monthly credit card repayment:

• A ‘payment reminder’ event (2 days prior to due date), and
• A ‘payment due’ event (on the due date)

Both entries appeared at 12 noon, and had an alert at 5 minutes prior to prompt response. Event details were limited for the trial, with a link direct to nab.com.au to make payment.

The test project would focus on Apple users as a priority.

5. Outcomes

• The Participation Rate by banking customers in the project was 15%, extremely high and well above normal for bank project trials;
• Payments by ECAL (Apple) users were the best performing overall, delivering:
  • 65.79% cure rate by the due date (+3.64% better than SMS reminders);
  • 81.58% cure rate at 2 days after due date (+12%);
• The two-date ‘payment reminder’ entry for ECAL (Apple) users resulted in the biggest increase in payments (+37%);
• The top two performing reminder methods were ECAL influenced.