Profile: OCBC Ng Li Lian

It may be celebrating its 100th birthday next year, but OCBC was keen to develop a fresh banking experience for Gen Y. Deepa Balji Jegarajah discovers how Ng Li Lian has updated its image.

Up until two years ago, you could walk into any OCBC bank and stale air would seep into your nostrils. Whether it was the carpets or the fact the bank had been in Singapore since 1912 is for the jury to decide.

But since 2009, the bank has shaved years off its look, feel and service. From its innovative first-in-market full-service Sunday banking to the fun-filled Mighty Savers programme for children, and the recently launched “Frank by OCBC” targeting youth – this emotionally engaging marketing approach has differentiated OCBC from its competitors.

Today, you can walk into any OCBC bank on the island and be greeted by young staff with ready smiles and an eagerness to provide great service – a rarity in Singapore.

Despite being known to appeal to a more mature mass-market group, OCBC launched the Frank programme to refresh its client base and target a non-traditional age profile.

Frank targets students and young adults, aiming to connect with them on their values and the way they see money.

It also aims to provide a banking experience that is simple and relevant to these youths.

The bank hopes the deviation from its usual “serious” corporate image will reach the youth, who it recognises as being “most disengaged with the banking sector in terms of how banks provide their products and services”. It hopes the name and marketing efforts will convey progressiveness, trust and honesty.

For the programme, special Frank retail stores, aside from its OCBC branches, have been set up. These are designed differently from its traditional branches, allowing customers to take time to browse, touch and ask questions about the products as well as their banking needs.

To further connect with youth, OCBC transformed its branches at local universities, Singapore Management University and Nanyang Technological University (NTU), into Frank retail stores.

“In talking and listening to youths and young working adults, we realised they are currently the most disengaged with banks,” says Ng Li Lian, OCBC’s head of marketing for global consumer financial services.

“No banks were deliberately catering to their needs, attitudes, preferences or lifestyle. We saw the opportunity to create a completely new way of banking for them. We started with extensive research that involved following the segment in their daily lives.”

Ng adds that targeting the youth and young working segments is a natural next step for the Singapore-listed bank, given its Mighty Savers programme for children and families.

“It was obvious we needed a strong proposition to transit our young Mighty Savers customers into as they approach adulthood. Just as importantly, this was an available marketing space given that not many financial institutions were actively engaging the young with a relevant banking experience,” she says.

Mighty Savers is an interactive savings programme launched in 2007 to help parents educate children on savings through the Mighty Savers™ Stickers and Card game.

When the bank conceptualised the programme it knew it needed to differentiate beyond product features by engaging children and parents.

“We set out to create a brand story and experience around the Mighty Savers that later extended into the entire range of products for young families, including the child development account (or baby bonus).

“Today, most children in pre-school and lower primary know OCBC. So do their parents. The high awareness and success of the Mighty Savers programme is the pride of the product and marketing teams.”

Ng says the programme has given the bank access to a base of customers that in the past would never have considered OCBC for its needs.

The bank had focused attention on more targeted marketing, instead of mass media, but is now putting more thought into direct mail and digital marketing.

While OCBC still spends most of its budget on traditional media, – a strategic decision to target the older generation who are still the big-ticket item buyers – it has been steadily raising the share of digital to rope in a new customer base, largely comprising children and their parents.

Five years ago, digital media spend for the consumer marketing division was only 5%, but today stands at 20% with the rest being allocated to traditional media.

Ng says in the next five years, the split between digital and traditional could reach 40% to 60%, respectively, as the media scene evolves and the bank targets new segments.

“Given limited marketing budgets and the pressure for return-on-investment, are we courageous enough to try (more digital)? Striking the balance is the key and we still use mass media extensively to target the older audience.

“As we study the behaviour of the younger, tech-savvy audience, we have made some in-roads in reaching out to consumers in the digital and social context. Our OCBC Dreams Space Facebook page has proven to be a good way to connect and engage with this target group.”

Having been in banking for 12 years (OCBC for five and DBS for seven), Ng says a marketer’s perennial challenge is measurement of marketing dollars in producing business results.

“All these cannot be done by the marketing department alone. Increasingly, we need to embrace the reality that ‘marketing’ is too important to be left to (just) the marketing department.”

“This was an available marketing space given that not many financial institutions were actively engaging the young with a relevant banking experience.”