A Model to Determine Customer Lifetime Value in a Retail Banking Context

During the past decade, the retail banking industry started to face a set of radically new challenges that had an overall negative impact on industry margin and profitability. In response to these challenges, more and more retail banks have focused on increasing the scale of their operations, which has led to a rising importance of mergers and acquisitions (M&A). From a Marketing perspective, M&A transactions are nothing other than the acquisition of the customer base of one company by another one, usually based on the assumption that the acquiring bank can manage this customer base more profitably than the selling bank was able to. It is therefore not surprising that questions about the valuation of customers have become more important than ever in the retail banking industry. Our article provides a contribution in this area by presenting a customer valuation model that we developed in cooperation with a leading German retail bank, which takes account of the specific requirements of this industry. Our model is based on a combination of first-order Markov chain modeling and CART (classification and regression tree) and can deal equally well with discrete one-time transactions as with continuous revenue streams. Furthermore, it is based on the analysis of homogeneous groups instead of individual customers and is easy to understand and parsimonious in nature. In our article we provide proof of the practical value of our approach by validating our model using 6.2 million datasets. This validation shows how our model can be applied in day-to-day business life.