All posts by Neel Williams

What should you expect to gain from deposit price elasticity models and what can you do with them to maximize benefit to the business?

This is the third in a series of blogs on deposit pricing, focusing on price elasticity modelling approaches and challenges. The goal of any deposit price optimization solution is to make data-driven pricing decisions to manage portfolio balances and trade these off against the associated costs. These solutions should allow a pricing manager to prepare and run what-if analyses to assess the impact of pricing strategies, competitor price actions or movements in central bank base rates. Fundamental to these solutions are price-elasticity models that capture and predict customer behavior as a response to pricing and other non-price factors. In this blog, we discuss the challenges and solution approaches for the development of robust price-elasticity models. Price Response Signal Price sensitivity can be measured with regards to product rate, market ranking, competitor rates or even interest paid to other products in the portfolio. The modelling challenge is not only to measure... [Read More]

This is the second in a series of blog posts on deposit price elasticity, focusing on the modelling data requirements. There are several different modelling techniques and approaches to measure deposit price elasticity, which is dependent on the actual business problem and model usage. The exact data requirements might need to be amended to account for the modelling technique, but a large number of data items are consistent across all approaches. As with all modelling projects, it is good to initially take a step back and think about what type of information you would expect to be predictive, impact deposit price elasticity, and make you move your savings across different products and / or financial institutions. We would suggest that considering the below fields would be best practice for a deposit price elasticity model development: Product details: Historical interest rate of the product(s) to be modelled, this would include retention... [Read More]

Many top financial institutions have begun using predictive modelling and optimization to improve deposit pricing. This requires an understanding of customers’ deposit price elasticity — how sensitive are they to pricing changes, and what is the relationship between price and demand at the customer, segment and portfolio level? I’m going to explore this topic in a series of posts, which should be useful both to deposit portfolio managers and analytics teams. To start with, let’s look at the basics. Price elasticity is the study of responsiveness, and how the demand of a product changes with respect to price (and/or the price of competitors). Understanding deposit price elasticity, or having models that predict this, means you can quantify: Impact of a product’s price change on the deposit product How competitor price changes impact a deposit portfolio Impact of changing macro-economic conditions, such as a change in central bank lending rate How... [Read More]