By Anna Pantazi (Managing Director)
Every product, strategy and commercial team in banking wants to design a current account and savings portfolio that customers genuinely value and actively choose – right?
It doesn’t matter whether you’re refreshing your retail current account line-up, creating a new packaged account, redesigning everyday savings, launching fixed-term products, or shaping a digital money-management experience, you want to build something that stands out, feels intuitive, delivers real value, and avoids becoming just another ‘me-too’ proposition in a crowded market.
But understanding how customers evaluate one account or savings product over another isn’t straightforward (shock, I know). Customers weigh up a surprisingly complex set of factors when deciding whether to open, switch, or actively use an account:
At this point you might be thinking “I already know this, stop teaching me to suck eggs.” And you’d be right - most teams do have this level of insight. They can identify the main choice factors. Tick. And they are using them to varying degrees to inform proposition development. Tick.
That’s all well and good, but it’s still not enough if you want to truly stand out. To build meaningful propositions that set you apart, you need to go deeper. You need to quantify how much each factor matters, what trade-offs customers are willing to make, and which bundles of rate, access, perks and experience are the most compelling. Because once you know that, you can design propositions you know customers will choose.
Before talking about the method itself, imagine trying to build the ideal current account for young families, or the optimal savings suite for digitally-savvy mass-affluent customers. You're choosing between endless combinations:
Do you know which features drive switching? Which win primary-account status? Which increase deposits or improve savings stickiness? Which justify a fee, and which require you to remove one?
Conjoint analysis lets you answer these questions by presenting customers with realistic combinations of features, benefits, pricing and access rules so you can see exactly how they make trade-offs in real life.
Instead of relying on claimed preferences (“I think I’d prioritise interest rate over incentives”), it measures real choice behaviour (“When everything is on the table, this is what I actually pick”). It reveals the true weight customers place on things like rate vs access, overdraft cost vs bundled benefits, digital experience vs financial incentives, certainty vs flexibility and brand trust vs headline pricing.
And perhaps most crucially for banks, it identifies which combinations create propositions that win account opening, primary usage, and deposit growth.
Example: You may discover that clarity on how to access and move money is more important to customers than a slightly higher interest rate, challenging long-held internal assumptions.
Example: A packaged-account benefit everyone assumed was essential (e.g. mobile insurance) may have minimal effect on choice for younger customers.
Example: Customers who value budgeting tools behave very differently from those who value interest maximisation, leading to a clearer portfolio structure.
Example: You can test whether adding a mid-tier packaged account cannibalises your premium tier or strengthens the overall line-up.
Example: You can test whether increasing a packaged account fee from £10 to £14 materially shifts take-up, before making a risky pricing decision.
Example: You might learn that overdraft clarity drives more switching than rewards, reshaping your messaging hierarchy.
Ultimately, conjoint analysis helps banks understand their customers at a deeper level, specifically the decisions they make and why they make them, so you can invest where it matters i.e. into the rates, features and experiences that genuinely influence acquisition, primary usage and savings growth.
If you’re building or refreshing a current account or savings portfolio, you’ll constantly be balancing rate strategy, risk, cost, regulatory constraints and competitive pressure. But in the end, one question matters more than anything: why would a customer choose your account over everything else available to them?
This is exactly where choice-based conjoint analysis, paired with deep banking expertise, becomes your best friend. And it’s where KAE has been supporting banks for more than 30 years.
From current account design, to savings architecture, to pricing, benefits and digital tooling, we’ve helped banks understand and quantify what customers truly value, and turned that into actionable product and marketing strategies.
📞 So if you want to build propositions that get picked, I’d love to talk. Book a call with me and let’s explore how conjoint can help you design a portfolio your customers choose.