Abstract:

More than one in three adults in the United Kingdom, and a majority of working class men and women still have no current/cheque bank account, and while legislation is planned to enable the National Giro and Trustee Savings Banks to increase their appeal to the unbanked, both start from a smaller base than in any other European country. New consumer finance outlets were established to attract the unbanked, with little apparent success. This paper will look at both these aspects if current and future plans to attract the unbanked, and discuss the extent to which the use of market research techniques, and improvements in the quality of the research techniques could have prevented past failures, and could be used to market financial services to the unbanked in a more cost effective manner in the future.