PNC Bank Breaks Through Gen Y Blindspot
December 3, 2008 4 Comments
Last year I proclaimed that Banks Have A Gen Y Blind Spot. Well, that’s no longer true for all banks. It turns out that PNC enlisted IDEO to help engage Gen Y and created a new offering: VirtualWallet. According to a recent BusinessWeek article, PNC has signed up more than 20,000 customers (70% from Gen Y) and is on track to break even in two years.
Here’s how VirtualWallet is described on the IDEO Website:
[It is] a family of banking products that provide customers with seamless access to their finances and intuitive, tangible, and direct control of their money. Centered on electronic transactional banking, it is designed to both promote and optimize banking activities with features and visualizations that support the mental models and lifestyles of its Gen Y customers
My take: I really like VirtualWallet. It shows what you can do when you explicitly focus on Gen Y. The long-term success will require ongoing nurturing by PNC, but the initial approach makes a lot of sense because:
- It applies a strategy called online infusion. While it’s a financial offering, online features like a money slide bar to graphically indicate available funds, a “Savings Engine” that helps customers establish rules around spending, and a playful instant transfer feature named “Punch the Pig” are core to the value proposition.
- The online experience implements many components of the four strategies we’ve defined for engaging Gen Y: 1) Immediacy, 2) Gen Y literacy, 3) Individualism, and 4) Social Interactivity.
- There’s a mobile component. While this wouldn’t make sense for many banking applications based on overall mobile usage, it’s almost a requirement if you want to target Gen Y; many of whom view their cell phone as their primary digital device.
- The approach starts with customer needs. While this is not novel for projects that involve IDEO, many companies aren’t diligent enough in starting with a solid process for uncovering the true needs of specific customer segments. By understanding Gen Y behaviors, the bank can actually charge fees for anything more than 3 checks per month.
The bottom line: Gen Y will be getting a lot more attention from banks.
About Bruce Temkin, CCXP
Customer Experience Matters® 
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The product is interesting, but the website misses the mark both for Gen Y as well as applying principles of Neuro Web Design. Where are the photos of 20 year olds? Customer stories? I’ve written a review at my blog, What Makes Them Click (www.whatmakesthemclick.blogspot.com). And the You Tube video that PNC put out makes me think that this is a product marketed by Gen Xers. Hopefully they really did use Gen Y customers in the design of the product itself. Maybe they should have used them in the design of the website and You Tube video too!
Susan: Thanks for your feedback. While the site definitely has some flaws (I’ve found basic usability problems as well as some places where it could be more tailored to Gen Y), I think it does a reasonably good job of reaching out to Gen Y; certainly better than most of its competitors.
Very Interesting product. I agree that the site misses the mark gfor those Gen Y’ers.