Role:
Associate, Marketing Rotational Program
Program Duration:
1.5 Years (3 rotations)
Introduction to the Program:
As an Associate within Scotiabank’s Marketing Rotational Program, I completed three intensive rotations over 1.5 years, gaining diverse experience across critical functions. This program equipped me with a holistic understanding of financial services marketing, emphasizing data-driven decision-making and strategic market insights. My key contributions focused on leveraging advanced analytics and comprehensive research to directly inform and optimize marketing and product strategies at both retail and commercial levels.
Project 1: Global CX Market Research – Competitive NPS Reporting
Organizational Problem:
In a highly competitive and evolving financial landscape, Scotiabank’s C-suite, marketing, and product teams required continuous, granular, and comparative insights into customer experience (CX) to proactively inform strategic decisions. The challenge was to transform vast volumes of raw customer feedback into a comprehensive, national Competitive Net Promoter Score (CNPS) report. This report not only tracked Scotiabank’s aggregate performance but also provided critical competitive intelligence against Canada’s leading financial institutions, offering actionable insights across diverse retail banking channels (Digital, Branch, Call Center, Mobile, etc.) and product onboarding journeys (credit card, chequing, mortgage, etc.). Without this systematic reporting, leadership lacked the crucial intelligence needed to identify CX improvement opportunities and maintain a competitive edge at a national scale.
Goal:
My goal was to transform over 1,000 data points into a national competitive NPS report that provided Scotiabank’s leadership with a clear, actionable view of retail customer experience. This report highlighted both quarterly performance and historical trends, aiming to directly inform strategic improvements in product, channels, and services, driving enhanced customer advocacy and loyalty.
Actions & Execution:
To deliver these critical insights, I undertook an analytical process, leveraging statistical tools and strategic communication:
- Data Acquisition & Preparation: Received raw national survey data from external vendors.
- Advanced Data Transformation: Utilized SPSS syntax to perform comprehensive data cleaning, create derived variables, and calculate Net Promoter Scores (NPS) for Scotiabank and each competitor across all retail banking channels and onboarding journeys.
- Statistical Analysis & Trend Identification: Conducted statistical significance testing to identify meaningful Quarter-over-Quarter and Year-over-Year changes in NPS for all banks and categories, identifying areas of growth, stagnation, or decline.
- Strategic Reporting & Narrative Development: Translated statistical findings into a concise and visually compelling PowerPoint presentation. I developed a clear, actionable narrative that accurately represented the data, highlighted the most salient competitive insights, and provided direct implications for marketing and product strategy at the executive level.
Results & Impact:
My comprehensive NPS reports served as a vital strategic tool, directly informing key business decisions and contributing to measurable improvements in customer experience:
- Direct Influence on CX Strategy: The insights provided in my reports directly informed marketing and product strategies, leading to initiatives aimed at improving customer experience.
- CX Improvement Contribution: My analytical work supported an approximately 11% Quarter-over-Quarter increase in aggregate NPS, demonstrating the tangible impact of data-driven strategic adjustments.
- Enhanced Competitive Understanding: The reports equipped the C-suite and relevant teams with a clearer understanding of Scotiabank’s CX standing relative to competitors, enabling targeted efforts to gain a competitive edge.
Project 2: Commercial Market Research – Merchant Services Study
Organizational Problem:
Scotiabank’s Merchant Services, a key commercial banking product delivered in partnership with Chase Payment Solutions, faced a significant market positioning challenge. The problem manifested in two primary messaging gaps:
- Lack of Perceived Value for Existing Clients: Existing Scotiabank business banking account holders were not recognizing a clear benefit in leveraging Scotiabank for their payment processing needs, even if they were already clients. This led to missed opportunities for cross-selling and deepening client relationships.
- Low Awareness of Partnership Benefits: There was a critical lack of market awareness that Scotiabank had partnered with Chase Payment Solutions to deliver these services. This prevented Scotiabank from capitalizing on Chase’s brand reputation as a leading global bank, which could significantly enhance the perceived quality and trust of the offering.
Goal:
The primary goal of this 278-business market research study was to gain a deeper understanding of how to reframe and reposition Scotiabank’s Merchant Services as a strategically advantageous decision for existing Scotiabank business banking clients. This involved:
- Identifying the key factors influencing a business’s decision to consolidate both banking and merchant services with a single institution.
- Confirming the prevalence of the ‘partner awareness gap’ across the industry (i.e., whether decision-makers know which payment processing partner their bank uses), to determine if this was a Scotiabank-specific issue or a broader market challenge.
Ultimately, the objective was to empower the marketing team to craft compelling new messaging that effectively communicated the unique benefits of Scotiabank’s Merchant Services, particularly given its partnership with Chase.
Actions & Execution:
To uncover the necessary insights for repositioning Merchant Services, I meticulously designed and managed a comprehensive market research study under strict constraints:
- Study Design & Management: I managed the distribution and execution of a survey with an external vendor, reaching 278 businesses (annual revenues $5M-$1B), adhering to a $20,000 budget and a 15-minute completion time.
- Strategic Survey Development (Qualtrics): I designed the Qualtrics survey with a precise mix of quantitative and qualitative questions, ensuring clarity and focusing on decision drivers and perceived value for businesses of varying scales.
- Competitive & Segmented Analysis: I incorporated questions to understand how other Big 5 banks positioned their merchant services, and segmented the offering (payment gateways, POS systems) to reveal industry-specific decision factors (e.g., online vs. brick-and-mortar).
- Foundational Insights for Messaging: My survey design directly aimed to gather data that would inform a comprehensive marketing narrative for merchant services across different client segments and operational models.
Results & Impact:
The insights derived from this comprehensive market research study directly influenced the marketing strategy for Merchant Services, leading to significant positive outcomes:
- Market-Driven Messaging Refinement: The study revealed that speed, technology, and customer service were the paramount factors influencing a business’s choice of merchant services, significantly outweighing brand recognition or partnership awareness (which was consistently low and often irrelevant, unless the partner was a dedicated FinTech).
- Strategic Repositioning: This critical finding helped clarify that the challenge in acquiring existing Scotiabank business banking clients for merchant services stemmed from a lack of perceived value in the offering itself, rather than a mere misunderstanding of its financial benefits from consolidation.
- Tangible Business Growth: The refined marketing strategy, informed by these insights, subsequently led to an approximately 5% lift in New Accounts Acquired for Merchant Services, demonstrating the direct impact of data-driven positioning.
Learnings & Next Steps:
My experience in Scotiabank’s Marketing Rotational Program profoundly reinforced a core belief: data is the most effective way to understand customers, and understanding customers is the singular path to sustainable growth. Operating within a highly regulated, large-scale financial institution where many products are commoditized, I learned that marketers must exhibit unparalleled creativity under significant constraints. The organizations that excel are those that can ask the right questions, deeply understand their customers, and thereby speak their clients’ language. In markets with a vast Total Addressable Market (TAM), competition intensifies, and winning requires empathy; an understanding that data uniquely provides.
Moving forward, I am committed to democratizing data and insights throughout an organization. My next steps would involve proactively establishing direct lines of communication and collaboration with product teams and other relevant cross-functional groups. My aim would be to not only deliver compelling insights to my immediate leadership but to also serve as an evangelist for customer-centric data, ensuring that critical information flows freely and informs decision-making across all relevant functions. This approach maximizes the impact of market intelligence and fosters a truly data-driven culture.
