Beyond the Account Balance with PNC TotalRewards (#789)

Paula: Hello, and welcome to Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV, a show for loyalty marketing professionals.

Paula: I’m Paula Thomas, the founder and CEO of Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV, where we feature insightful conversations with loyalty professionals from the world’s leading brands.

Paula: Today’s episode is part of the Wiser Loyalty podcast series, and is hosted by Aaron Dauphinee, Chief Marketing Officer of Wise Marketer Group.

Paula: Wise Marketer Group is an education, advisory and research and media service company, providing resources for loyalty marketers through three business offerings.

Paula: A global leader in loyalty education through the Loyalty Academy platform, which offers the Certified Loyalty Marketing Professional or CLMP designation.

Paula: A trusted advisor through its advisory and research services, supporting loyalty brands and a leading source of news, information and insights through the Wise Marketer digital publication.

Paula: I hope you enjoyed this episode brought to you by Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV in partnership with Wise Marketer Group.

Aaron: Hi, everyone.

Aaron: Welcome back to another edition of the Wiser Loyalty Podcast Series.

Aaron: It’s a podcast series now that’s into its third year and is brought to you each month in partnership with Let’s Talk Loyalty and the Wise Marketer.

Aaron: For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Aaron Dauphinee.

Aaron: I’ll be your host for today’s edition and I am the CMO here at the Wise Marketer Group or WMG, as we more commonly refer to ourselves.

Aaron: We operate the Wise Marketer Media Property, which you can get news, information, and insights on all the things for the loyalty industry.

Aaron: We also operate the Loyalty Academy, where we’re leaders in loyalty education, including the first industry professional designation, which is the certified loyalty market professional designation.

Aaron: We also recently launched WMG Research and Advisory Services to bring a third leg of the stool to the fray.

Aaron: I’m doing a bit of a different intro today because, for those of you who follow the Wiser Loyalty series, you know we have a preset introduction, and I just wanted to shake things up a bit because the conversation is going to be really fun.

Aaron: In today’s conversation, it really sits right at the intersection of two things.

Aaron: First, what it actually takes to earn customer loyalty, and second, how the stakes change when you’re doing it inside a financial institution.

Aaron: So we all know that this banking category is where trust has been really quite foundational, but we also know that trust is not the same thing as loyalty.

Aaron: Customers may stay with a bank out of inertia, convenience, or even switching friction, and that’s not loyalty.

Aaron: Loyalty is something a brand has to earn, they have to demonstrate, and continuously reinforce.

Aaron: And that requires both intention, program design, and quite frankly, a genuine commitment to delivering value.

Aaron: PNC Bank has made exactly that commitment.

Aaron: And in April 226, PNC Bank officially launched PNC TotalRewards, which is a new relationship-based loyalty program that gives clients a clear, structured way to see the value of their banking relationship and earn greater benefits as that relationship grows.

Aaron: The program follows a May 2025 employee pilot and a phased regional rollout starting in Chicago, and it’s now expanding nationally.

Aaron: So with silver, gold, and platinum tiers tied to relationship debt and benefit-spanning enhanced credit card rewards, elevated saving rates, cash rewards on lending and priority servicing, PNC TotalRewards represents one of the most substantive loyalty moves in major US banking in many, many years.

Aaron: And today I have the pleasure of speaking with Victoria Dravneek, head of loyalty strategy platforms at PNC Bank.

Aaron: She’s the executive who has led the program from concept to launch.

Aaron: And so welcome, Victoria.

Victoria: Thank you.

Victoria: Thank you for having me, Aaron.

Aaron: Great.

Aaron: We do have a global audience.

Aaron: So for our listeners less familiar with PNC Bank, I’m going to give you a quick overview.

Aaron: PNC Financial Services Group is one of the largest diversified financial institutions in the US.

Aaron: They’re organized around retail and business banking, corporate and institutional banking, wealth management, also asset management.

Aaron: It operates across more than two dozen states and serves millions of consumers and commercial clients.

Aaron: PNC TotalRewards is PNC Bank’s most significant investment to date in a unified relationship banking loyalty proposition for its retail client base.

Aaron: And if I do a quick top line on our guest as well, Victoria is the head of loyalty strategy and platforms at PNC Bank, where she’s led that, as I said earlier, design, development and national role of PNC TotalRewards.

Aaron: She’s been the primary voice behind the program’s public launch and has spoken to its philosophy of building a very client-centric loyalty model that works for every PNC Bank customer.

Aaron: And this means whether they are just starting their banking journey with PNC or bringing a multi-product household relationship to the bank.

Aaron: So Victoria brings both commercial strategy and customer experience sensibility to the challenge of making loyalty work and financial services.

Aaron: And that included significant roles of Bank of America as well.

Aaron: So Victoria, what have I missed that’s key for our conversation today?

Aaron: And what else should our listeners know about your PNC TotalRewards before we dive in?

Victoria: You did such an amazing job.

Victoria: You made a son of me.

Victoria: One thing I will say about the difference with loyalty and financial services over time versus the difference in loyalty outside of financial services.

Victoria: So a lot of people, when they think about financial services and they think about loyalty, they think about their credit card, right?

Victoria: So because for many, many years in financial services, it really did mean credit card.

Victoria: That was the major vehicle, which was amazing for credit cards, right?

Victoria: It sold a lot of cards and it got a lot of top of wallet usage of the cards, but it didn’t really do everything for the rest of the relationship, right?

Victoria: When you look outside of financial services, generally, all of those programs are truly client-centric.

Victoria: So what we’ve done here is very much like we did, I did with the PASS program, you mentioned B of A, is we brought that client-centric nature to PNC to create a truly client-centric program that would drive the entire relationship with the client.

Victoria: And that’s what makes this truly different.

Aaron: Oh, I love that.

Aaron: And that’s excellent context for setting up today’s conversation.

Aaron: And I want to talk more specifically about this client centricity that you brought to PNC Bank and the PNC TotalRewards program in just a second.

Aaron: But before we do, we do have a history in getting to know our guests a little bit more.

Aaron: And so one of the ways that we do that is we ask a common question across all the podcast hosts, which is, what book are you currently reading?

Aaron: And what’s the most meaningful takeaway that you’ve taken from it so far?

Victoria: Sure.

Victoria: Well, I read all the time.

Victoria: I read a lot of fiction, but that’s not as interesting for today.

Victoria: One of the books, like I generally have a book on my desk.

Victoria: One of the books that I just happen to have on my desk right now is Winning on Purpose.

Victoria: It’s by Fred Reichheld.

Victoria: He was the net promoter score guy.

Victoria: And one of the things he said, I actually have written down here is, loyalty means investing time and resources in relationships.

Victoria: That’s how you advance the principles on which those relationships are founded.

Victoria: That’s how you make the world better.

Victoria: Now, someone hearing that just off hand might say, well, duh, that’s common sense, right?

Victoria: But it’s real and it’s true, right?

Victoria: And if you scale that up in terms of loyalty strategy, that’s really what everyone’s trying to do with our loyalty strategy.

Victoria: They’re trying to make those stronger relationships.

Aaron: Yeah.

Aaron: Reichheld is an OG for our industry for many, many years.

Aaron: And so this is amazing.

Aaron: I don’t think I’ve had someone actually quote one of his books in quite a while.

Aaron: So it’s great that you’ve brought him to the foray again.

Aaron: That’s wonderful.

Aaron: I think let’s dive in because I know we’ve got lots of questions for you.

Aaron: I’m really curious about PNC TotalRewards.

Aaron: And so let’s start with the high level.

Aaron: So banking is a category where trust is already kind of baked into the relationship to some degree.

Aaron: And customers literally hand over their financial lives to you.

Aaron: So what problem is it, a loyalty problem, sorry, let me start again.

Aaron: What problem is a loyalty program actually solving for at PNC Bank?

Aaron: And I guess I’m kind of asking like, what gap exists that PNC TotalRewards is designed to fill that you couldn’t fill previously?

Victoria: Well, it’s funny, you say, you know, it’s about trust and people hand over their financial life.

Victoria: But the fact is they hand over pieces of their financial life, right?

Victoria: So if you think about the average customer, they might open their first account like with their parents at their parents’ bank, you know, when they’re young, the average age is getting younger all the time for that.

Victoria: You know, so that might be the first checking savings account.

Victoria: But then when they open their first credit card, that might be from some other institution.

Victoria: Maybe they bought something or a store car or something like that.

Victoria: And then, you know, they go buy a car.

Victoria: That’s a different place.

Victoria: Then they go, you know, they do their first investments.

Victoria: Maybe that’s a 401k.

Victoria: Maybe they start over, you know, at some investment house somewhere.

Victoria: And their financial relationship becomes very fragmented.

Victoria: A program like PNC TotalRewards actually brings more of that relationship together, because by bringing it together, they can get more value out of their entire relationship.

Victoria: And so for the customer, it solves being able to get more value out of their entire relationship, and actually having someone who can see across their relationship, who can actually help them over time.

Victoria: But for a financial institution, it also reduces that fragment at this, right?

Victoria: So you might have clients who, they have the capacity for more of a relationship, but you don’t have that relationship with you.

Victoria: So you really can’t help them that way, and really can’t grow with them that way.

Aaron: That’s interesting, because you talked about these different life phases that individuals are going through, where they would pick up a different financial product along the way, and that’s so logical.

Aaron: I think everyone will keep nodding their head in agreement with that similar shared experience.

Aaron: And so I guess the question is, if people are already going to do these activities, is the bank simply rewarding customers for things that they were, like I just said, already going to do?

Aaron: Or how did PNC Bank think about that challenge when redesigning PNC TotalRewards to some degree?

Victoria: Yeah, in many ways, yes.

Victoria: We are rewarding clients for activities they’re already doing, they’re already going to do.

Victoria: Our goal is to be a partner with our clients and to help them every step along the way.

Victoria: And so this is our way of really doing that.

Aaron: I think that’s key, right?

Aaron: Because there’s been some skepticisms to some degree with banking loyalty programs, whether they can actually change customer behavior.

Aaron: I know it’s early days, but are you already starting to see some of that change behavior?

Victoria: So we have actually, it’s very early days.

Victoria: And so some of the things we track as a part of the program is, we just we track this client cohort as a cohort, we watch what they’re doing, right?

Victoria: And so they are opening products on a greater clip than the rest of the client population.

Victoria: They’re also bringing over more of the relationship into their deposit investment accounts.

Victoria: And so those are some of the things that we’re tracking we’re seeing early on.

Aaron: That’s amazing.

Aaron: Those are the kind of the results that you’re obviously looking for early on.

Aaron: So hopefully they will continue and I’m sure they will.

Aaron: But perhaps, walk us through the customer value proposition that’s at the heart of PNC TotalRewards.

Aaron: I think the quote was do more, earn more, end quote.

Aaron: So what does do more, earn more actually look like in the everyday life of a PNC Bank customer?

Victoria: Right.

Victoria: Well, I think you’ll find them very common sense.

Victoria: Because all of this, it just makes sense and it’s very common sense, right?

Victoria: So if you think about it, do more, get more is pretty much the byline of every loyalty program out there, right?

Victoria: Because you’re trying to get your best clients to do all their business with you, and you’re trying to get the clients who could be doing more business to do more business with you.

Victoria: And so you have to put it in a context that it just becomes common sense, right?

Victoria: It becomes really attractive to do more.

Victoria: And so that’s really what we’ve set up with our clients.

Victoria: So you were mentioning in the beginning of a call where we have different tiers.

Victoria: Well, all of our clients, regardless if you have a dollar or a million dollars with us, we’re going to give you value, right?

Victoria: You’re already getting value out of your relationship.

Victoria: We want to make that really transparent for you.

Victoria: So we’ve gathered up all of that value, and we have the PNC TotalRewards experience digitally, where we’re actually showing you that value.

Victoria: We’re showing you all the purchase payback, all the credit card rewards, all the other incentive rewards that you’ve received.

Victoria: And then we’re immediately showing you, how do you get more out of your relationship?

Victoria: What are some simple steps that you can take in your relationship to get more back?

Victoria: And then for our clients who have 25,000 or more with us in their deposit investment accounts, we say, okay, we have a much greater value exchange with you and you know that.

Victoria: So you expect more from us and we need to be giving that to you.

Victoria: And so through this program, if you enroll in one of the tiers of the select tier, sure you’re able to get more benefits on all of your products and services.

Aaron: I mean, you do have a lot of different products.

Aaron: I think that’s important to talk about.

Aaron: Retail banking, wealth management, mortgage, business banking, it will kind of alluded to earlier.

Aaron: So with that, even though you’re getting more as you describe it, I have to imagine like there needs to be some trade-offs that occurred.

Aaron: So how did you design this unified program that was delivering relevant value across this breadth of product lines and customer segments that you have?

Aaron: Like, what were some of your hardest trade-offs?

Aaron: I have to imagine there were some.

Victoria: So I would say we are in the process of building what will be the future.

Victoria: So what you can see in market is kind of the top of an iceberg, right?

Victoria: There’s also other activity going on, right?

Victoria: So we really targeted our retail population first because it made the most sense.

Victoria: That’s where we kind of had the lowest-hanging fruit in our relationship, right?

Victoria: And then we further zeroed in on our emerging and mass-affluent clients because there was a great value exchange there, right?

Victoria: And so what we built in our baseline is really targeting there first, but then, as you said, we have this really broad continuum across our entire business, and there’s so much opportunity, right?

Victoria: So next, we work on small business.

Victoria: We go back to mass market.

Victoria: We look at our private bank audiences.

Victoria: We look at our CNIB audiences, and there’s a lot of cross-pollination between these audiences to be had, but it really all starts with this foundational baseline.

Victoria: So in the beginning, there was so many different things we needed to do and we needed to narrow it down.

Victoria: So it was more of a trade-off exercise in my mind, but more of a narrowing down of what actually needed to happen to put the baseline program in place and really start adding value to the customers.

Victoria: And so when I looked internally at everything that was there, we did an assessment.

Victoria: There was an assessment from a people perspective.

Victoria: There was an assessment from a technology and a capabilities perspective.

Victoria: So for example, on the technology and capabilities perspective, we had the ability to identify the client, but not the ability to identify these particular clients.

Victoria: So we needed a capability for that.

Victoria: We had the ability to get the data to the channels.

Victoria: We had fairly new systems to do that.

Victoria: But the quality of the data that we needed was in varying states.

Victoria: We had to shore all of that up to be able to use it and to be able to rely on it and deliver on our promises.

Victoria: All of our channels at PNC, so our digital and branch and care center, they were in various states of transformation.

Victoria: So we had to work with a lot of the transformation to ensure that we lined up with our timelines and our capability sets and everything that we needed to do.

Victoria: Then the ability to deliver the benefit value to our clients, we didn’t have a scalable platform for that.

Victoria: We had to determine, okay, what is the right platform for this?

Victoria: How can we ensure that we are delivering in all of our promises?

Victoria: That became an amalgamation of third-party and internal systems.

Aaron: Very interesting.

Aaron: I love this because you’re taking what is seemingly a very complex story and refining down into some elements of simplicity that you talked about, your customer strategy, but then leading to the technology.

Aaron: That’s intriguing for me because we all know banking technology is quite complex and certainly there’s no shortage of projects that would be competing for a priority.

Aaron: No small undertaking, but you hit a spot for me that I’m curious about.

Aaron: Walk us a bit through the build versus buy versus partnering decisions.

Aaron: What were the criteria?

Aaron: What did you rule out?

Aaron: Why did you all make choose the path that led you to building around your legacy infrastructure?

Victoria: Yeah.

Victoria: First, it was determining what were the most important things to do first.

Victoria: It was really important.

Victoria: I know from loyalty research that clients want to feel valued and they want to see the tangible value.

Victoria: There were certain kind of guiding principles that you defined that we can get into.

Victoria: But that tangible value was so important.

Victoria: It was really important that we built the capability to do all the things that we said, but then we were able to show full transparency in all of our channels.

Victoria: When you go to the digital experience, you can see down to the transaction level, every bit of value that you’ve earned plus everything that you could earn.

Victoria: All of that same information is available and more in our branch and care center for more productive sales and servicing conversations with clients.

Victoria: A lot of that capability is in-house capability.

Victoria: Already existed, we had some existing vendors, et cetera, that we used for that for the guts of the thing.

Victoria: So how did we identify the customer in their life cycle?

Victoria: We didn’t have anything that would do that, and anything that would deliver the benefit value.

Victoria: So the customer life cycle, we knew we didn’t have it, we knew we couldn’t build it in-house.

Victoria: We did have a vendor that we had been using for a lot of other capabilities.

Victoria: So the shortest distance between two places is a straight line.

Victoria: It was part of the conversation, right?

Victoria: We went through, we looked at a couple, but really at the end of the day, they really made sense, right?

Victoria: They had similar capabilities and it wasn’t such a stress for us.

Victoria: Then it came to the benefit delivery, right?

Victoria: So there were areas in benefit delivery that we didn’t really want to mess with.

Victoria: So our credit card rewards, for example, we had systems that already governed our credit card rewards.

Victoria: We had systems that already governed what was going to customers from an investment perspective, for example.

Victoria: So we’re like, okay, how can we create something where we can still use those internal systems who they reliably deliver on their promises today?

Victoria: And the last thing I wanted to touch was the inside of a credit card system.

Victoria: We didn’t want to touch the inside of origination for loans.

Victoria: So one of the novel things that our loan partners came up with, they were like, okay, well, instead of offering a rate discount, let’s offer cash back every quarter based on the principle of the loan.

Victoria: And we’re like, let’s test it with customers.

Victoria: Customers loved it.

Victoria: So we said, okay, let’s do this.

Victoria: And then we had that same system that already knew us, that we were already using for the customer life cycle.

Victoria: We leveraged them as kind of our grand facilitator, if you will.

Victoria: So they would kind of come in and talk with us and talk with our systems and go, okay, pay that, do this, do this.

Victoria: And so we still had a system of record that kept everything into account, yet we maintain the fidelity of those systems that were already in place and working well.

Aaron: It sounds like a lot of pragmatism has gone into your decision making to just make it as, you know, the goal is to make things the best they can for a customer, being customer centric, and then how do you structure it around to build it?

Victoria: And it was, you know, it was, everything was very client centric, and it was very much, everybody was at the table together.

Victoria: That was the most important thing.

Victoria: You know, so the architect worked together with the technology folks together, with all the product folks together, with, you know, our compliance, our legal and our other partners and our marketing partners.

Victoria: From day one of concept development, it was so, so important to have everyone together in one place.

Victoria: And everyone, you know, because if you develop the concept together, you feel ownership, right?

Victoria: And when people feel ownership in something, they’re gonna fight for it.

Victoria: We also had a huge advantage of, the head of retail banking was the best sponsor ever for this.

Victoria: And he made sure that he removed obstacles along the way because that’s so very important, right?

Victoria: And we had to win over all these various groups of folks to ensure that we cared about their needs.

Victoria: We were really listening to them along the way.

Victoria: You know, so it was an amalgamation of that all the way through, from the concept development all the way through delivery.

Victoria: Like, when I think about the strategy itself, it includes all of it.

Aaron: I love hearing that.

Aaron: We are obviously advocates of loyalty being a build together as a build independent.

Aaron: And so it sounds like you had the right components coming together and the right individuals having enough stake in what was what you were creating and doing it together.

Aaron: So that’s amazing.

Aaron: It’s no shortage of, not lost me, how complex that must have been and how much time.

Aaron: Yeah, an undertaking for sure.

Aaron: So let’s build a little bit on that because I know there are some other tenants around PNC TotalRewards, like transparency and simplicity, like their core tenants.

Aaron: So that’s quite a meaningful commitment, quite frankly, in an industry where T’s and C’s have not always been a point of pride, right?

Aaron: I don’t want to get into that too much, but just to say, how did you think about building on transparency and simplicity and into your actual program design and not just having it be marketing language?

Victoria: It’s funny.

Victoria: From very early on, we spent a lot of time with leadership even before concept development.

Victoria: It was in my first 30 days, I came out with like 100 leaders and just talked to them out.

Victoria: Well, because I didn’t know about PNC.

Victoria: Just coming in and meeting with the leaders and understanding how much, they had a passion for the customer, they had a passion for collaborating with each other.

Victoria: It was a loyalty person’s dream.

Victoria: Then as we continued on and we got into concept development, we developed some guiding principles.

Victoria: Those guiding principles really did determine how we made decisions along the way.

Victoria: They’re still guiding how we make decisions.

Victoria: They will going forward.

Victoria: There were four main ones that lived on.

Victoria: Really, the first one was be client-centric.

Victoria: As we talked about in the beginning, we didn’t want to be product-tied.

Victoria: We wanted to be client-centric, truly client-centric.

Victoria: Technologically, that was a big challenge, but the people here rose to it.

Victoria: It was amazing.

Victoria: To be client-centric is to not tie everything to a product.

Victoria: It is to really think of the client first, and it is to make decisions on behalf of the client.

Victoria: Every time we had a decision to make about the design of the program, we said, what is the best thing for the client?

Victoria: What is the best and highest thing for the client?

Victoria: And that’s the thing we did.

Victoria: So for example, we have something, kind of a best-of kind of logic.

Victoria: So if we have a client who, you know, if there’s a deposit account, one client is like Platinum and one client is over on the account, the entire account will get the Platinum benefit.

Victoria: Because that is the best thing for the client overall.

Victoria: And so every single decision, there were so many decisions we had to make along the way, we asked that question.

Victoria: What is the best thing for the client?

Victoria: The second one really was to deliver one PNC.

Victoria: It was really important that we had one loyalty program, one loyalty continuum across PNC.

Victoria: We didn’t want to dilute the brand.

Victoria: So we had a couple of other kind of smaller little pieces in place.

Victoria: We had a choice program.

Victoria: We had like a Money Wise program.

Victoria: And we sunset all of this so that we can just have this continuum.

Victoria: So we’re not going to dilute the brand.

Victoria: We’re going to make sure that we have one set of controls.

Victoria: We always deliver on our promises.

Victoria: So that was another guiding principle that we’ll continue on with.

Victoria: We wanted to empower our employees.

Victoria: So we gave our employees the gold tier without meeting the balance requirements.

Victoria: And then we also made sure that we had really fun ways to train employees on the program, right?

Victoria: So we had these great games.

Victoria: And we had in-person training across the country.

Victoria: I was actually able to attend one of the trainings in the top of a branch.

Victoria: And you would have thought they were having a party.

Victoria: So we had like, you know, the PNC jumping into the game, TotalRewards jumping into the game.

Victoria: And they were just having the best time, just learning about the program and collaborating with each other, which they just love to do every day, right?

Victoria: And then finally, it was about engaging digitally.

Victoria: And so that’s all about, you know, making that client feel valued and showing them that value, like what’s in it for them transparently.

Victoria: So we knew it was like so important digitally to have all the information there at their fingertips so that they could get the most and the best out of the program.

Aaron: I mean, those are four amazing core tenets.

Aaron: They speak right to the best practices that we have in our Loyalty Academy educational program.

Aaron: So that’s amazing to hear that you’re utilizing that same ideology.

Aaron: And, you know, the fact that employees are loving and enjoying having a great time learning about the program and participating at a level that’s probably meaningful, right, for most of them, I would say.

Aaron: Probably an upgrade at extended value.

Aaron: Oh, very, very interesting.

Aaron: That’s good.

Aaron: Hey, let’s dive in a little bit more around this.

Aaron: I hope I’m not scratching an itch, but I’m just more curious.

Aaron: So, you know, for me, banking is quite, frankly, a trust-sensitive category in the way that some loyalty categories, they just aren’t going to ever be that way.

Aaron: And so if a poorly designed rewards program in retail or travel disappoints customers, there might be some forgiveness.

Aaron: But in banking, it may feel more like a little more of a breach of a relationship.

Aaron: So how did that context shape the way PNC Bank approached this new program and then your launch, quite frankly?

Victoria: You know, it shaped a lot.

Victoria: Our legal and compliance and customer advocacy partners, they were great partners, and there were a lot of them.

Victoria: But we partnered with them on every aspect of the experience.

Victoria: And they pushed us to do better and be better.

Victoria: And when I think about what we’ve put in place here, I’m really proud of the different things we’ve done.

Victoria: So for example, when I talk about delivering on our promises, we have an internal system that we’re leveraging that looks at every single transaction to ensure that we delivered on our promises.

Victoria: If it senses any kind of disruption, it spits out on exception that we can work and ensure that we’re fully delivering on all of our promises.

Victoria: We have mirror controls at the vendor we talked about that are also looking at the same time.

Victoria: Then we have other controls on the other systems that we shored up.

Victoria: I talked about data quality and all of that.

Victoria: So we made sure that all the systems around this were completely shored up, so we would deliver on all of our promises.

Victoria: So we thought that was so hugely important.

Victoria: Also, for our Golden Platinum clients, we have priority in concierge servicing.

Victoria: PNC has never had anything like this before.

Victoria: We know that the needs of these clients are a little more complex, and so we wanted to make sure that we had kind of this one-stop place that they could get everything that they needed.

Victoria: And so we have priority in concierge servicing gates that they’re automatically going to be routed to, where they have the extra expertise to be able to help them.

Victoria: We also have our premier banking offering that’s going out around the same time, targeting those same clients to ensure they can have a whole banking team to help them with anything they need.

Victoria: And so we’re not saying that we’re never going to make a mistake, but we’re saying that when we do, we’re going to make it right.

Victoria: We’re going to find it quick and we’re really going to make it right.

Aaron: Oh, I love that.

Aaron: And I mean, it’s not surprising to me.

Aaron: I’ve known PNC Bank.

Aaron: I’ve worked with the institution over a number of years in my career.

Aaron: And certainly, you’re known for having, I call it hospitality as a bit of a core part of your client experience.

Aaron: So that what you just talked about makes a ton of sense to me.

Aaron: But maybe let’s dig in on that a little bit more.

Aaron: Like, how does the cultural commitment to hospitality, for lack of a better term, you know, connect to PNC TotalRewards as a formal program?

Aaron: And do you see them reinforcing each other?

Aaron: Or are there moments where the program of mechanics and experience have to be reconciled to some degree?

Victoria: It’s kind of magical.

Victoria: So, you know, before loyalty, there was client obsession.

Victoria: So, our head of retail banking, Alex Silberstrom, really brought this concept of client obsession in a real way, as we were developing the program.

Victoria: He actually had hospitality training throughout all of the branches.

Victoria: He really believes in it.

Victoria: If you meet him and spend time with him, you’ll get it completely.

Victoria: But when you, as you were mentioning, when you walk into a PNC branch, it’s really like no other.

Victoria: And it has the type of gentility, I guess, if I’m making up words here, that you just don’t see as often these days.

Victoria: You know, you walk up to the door, oftentimes somebody’s opening the door for you, they’ll take your coat, they’ll offer you a beverage, they honestly sit down and listen to you and what it is that you need.

Victoria: Then when you leave, if it’s raining, they grab an umbrella, they’ll walk you to your car.

Victoria: You know, it’s just, it’s basic little things that a lot of people don’t do anymore.

Victoria: And so I didn’t, I really didn’t know how these things would play together until I started to see it.

Victoria: So, you know, definitely going on a lot of the market visits and sitting inside of the branches.

Victoria: And I started to see kind of the intersection of this beautiful hospitality with the customer, where you’re truly caring about them and the relationship with them.

Victoria: And then total rewards on top of that, it’s amazing.

Victoria: It’s the, you know, the employees in the branches are so, so excited.

Victoria: They’re excited about the hospitality.

Victoria: It really, you know, it fits in with them.

Victoria: The Loyalty Program fits in with them.

Victoria: It’s like a hand in glove.

Victoria: It’s been a really great experience.

Aaron: I love hearing this because it’s, you know, oftentimes programs talk about this construct of the big L loyalty versus programmatic loyalty.

Aaron: And what you’re describing is very much this mindset that brings together like the hospitality commitment, the culture attributes that you’re talking about.

Aaron: And of course the one that always sits on top of that is brand, right?

Aaron: The, you know, the brand promise of PNC Bank is well known to PNC TotalRewards references in the program.

Aaron: Can you talk a bit about that?

Aaron: Because I think that’s really critical for other brands to hear that those two things go hand in glove as opposed to being distinct separate entities.

Aaron: And I’m just curious, you know, were there moments where the loyalty logic and the brand logic pulled in different directions?

Aaron: Or is it much more like magical, like you described, where things have just become really sacrosanct and come together almost symbiotically?

Victoria: It’s been an interesting journey there.

Victoria: So, you know, my opinion, loyalty programs amplify everything about the brand and the product and the company, like if you’re doing them right.

Victoria: And I feel like PNC TotalRewards does that.

Victoria: You know, it amplifies each of the products, it amplifies this beautiful hospitality that’s going on.

Victoria: And I think it amplifies the brand, the brilliantly boring brand, right?

Victoria: I’ll admit, you know, when brilliantly boring first came out, I was like, huh, you know, because nobody wants to think they’re boring.

Victoria: But then it has the more I thought about it and the more I thought about our, you know, the stuff we geek out on that everyone else is going to find.

Aaron: Right, right.

Victoria: Oh, it really is the boring stuff to the customer, right?

Victoria: Because the customer just wants to go about their daily business, they want to get those things done, they want to go on their vacations, they want to hang up their family.

Victoria: And here we are, we’re behind the scenes, and we’re taking care of all the boring stuff, right?

Victoria: And we’re not making them look for stuff or fish around for stuff, we’re like presenting it to them, right?

Victoria: And that’s the brilliant part.

Victoria: They get to go do the brilliant things because we’re doing the boring things behind the scenes.

Victoria: So I don’t think that, you know, that there is no, I think everything fits so well together.

Victoria: And, you know, and as we go forward, you know, we kind of negotiate within the, you know, as we’re kind of developing, you know, the marketing and all the pieces, right?

Victoria: It’s like, okay, you know, there’s kind of this clever, brilliantly boring, then there’s the hospitality, and there’s like a nice healthy tension there of ensuring that, gosh, our first thing is making that customer feel really special, right?

Victoria: You know, but we’re going to make them smile too.

Victoria: So I think it all works well together.

Aaron: I love that idea of brilliantly boring, and that’s why I asked the question, like, how do you reconcile that with a program that you want to have exciting and fulfilling, and create some surprising delight in all the good things that come with the way in which we deliver loyalty?

Aaron: Maybe just talk a little bit more of that behind the scenes boring elements.

Aaron: Maybe they’re not boring to some people, but how is PNC thinking about measuring the success of PNC Total Rewards?

Aaron: Not just in the launch period, but over a long arc of the relationship-based program.

Aaron: What are the important outcomes that may take a couple of years to reveal themselves in the data, and what are you seeing early on?

Victoria: Sure.

Victoria: Loyalty programs, when you do them right, they lead to greater satisfaction and retention with your client base.

Victoria: That’s bottom line.

Victoria: For us, the lifeblood of the loyalty program is in the data.

Victoria: We measure primary and secondary data.

Victoria: The primary data is about the satisfaction, retention, and deepening.

Victoria: The secondary data is about all the things that will lead to that.

Victoria: From a primary perspective, we are measuring that cohort.

Victoria: We measure the cohort separately, which has been a bit of a shift for our product managers, because they’re used to the instant gratification of a product unit.

Victoria: If you think of a card, for example, they’re like, okay, we have this many units, this many units, this many units.

Victoria: Well, we’re going, no, we’re not going to look at the card, we’re going to look at the customer.

Victoria: We track these customer cohorts separately over time.

Victoria: Right now, we’re tracking any new products that they open, we’re tracking product usage.

Victoria: We’re also tracking new money in their deposit and investment accounts.

Victoria: So our business case is very highly precipitated on new money and deposit investment accounts.

Victoria: So when they consolidate their relationship, that is what happens.

Victoria: And our tiers are based on different dollar values that they have.

Victoria: And we know that based on the value we’re providing, we have more people who will bring over more of their relationship.

Victoria: And so we’re tracking all of those elements very closely.

Victoria: We’re also tracking from a secondary perspective everything that the client does with us digitally, everything they do in the branch, everything they do in the care center.

Victoria: And we’re making sure and also all of our operational metrics, because they’ll shut you down if that’s not correct.

Victoria: And we want to make sure we’re delivering on our promises, right?

Victoria: And so we do this over time, you know.

Victoria: So regular product manager, marketer is looking at units.

Victoria: You can get the immediate gratification.

Victoria: With this, you can’t get the immediate gratification.

Victoria: You’re doing it over time.

Victoria: How we determine the probability that the program is causing this additional growth.

Victoria: So we do compare this cohort to a similar cohort.

Victoria: Over time, we get enough data, we do multivariate analysis, we do greedy match analysis.

Victoria: And that tells us the percentage of probability that the program was the reason for the behavioral shift.

Aaron: Very good, very, very good.

Aaron: Yeah, so if I understood you correctly, there’s a group of customers that are almost like a control group, to some degree?

Victoria: Not in a traditional way, as in we’re holding them out.

Victoria: Well, because you can’t do that from a UDAB perspective, right?

Victoria: But we have the ability to find very similar cohorts of customers who are in and not in the program.

Aaron: Very, very cool, very cool.

Aaron: Let’s go a little bit further than that because relationship-based programs, they live or die by this change behavior that you’re talking about.

Aaron: So I think you set the thesis up well for what PNC TotalRewards is looking at.

Aaron: But are there any more specific actions?

Aaron: We talked about new money into deposit accounts.

Aaron: But are there other specific actions or moments in the program that are designed to accelerate the benefits or get to that more unified experience?

Victoria: Can you say more?

Aaron: Yeah.

Aaron: I mean, you talked about the idea that one of the things that you’re measuring for and looking forward to know that the program is succeeding is new money that’s coming in.

Aaron: Are there other things that the specific customer is doing, like the changes in behavior that you’re looking for to say, hey, this is a function of us and PNC TotalRewards coming in, that is getting this customer to do different things, cross-sell, digital engagement, things like that?

Victoria: Yeah, we are looking at the cross-sell with definitely the product deepening and the usage there.

Victoria: But then there’s individual campaigns and efforts we’ll have along the way, and we’ll be measuring very specific things there.

Victoria: And we’ll be measuring similar things over time.

Victoria: So what is their likelihood?

Victoria: What are they showing us?

Victoria: But what are they telling us?

Victoria: What is their likelihood to deepen and do more with us?

Victoria: What is their likelihood to refer us to someone?

Victoria: How satisfied are they?

Victoria: Are we seeing different numbers in this cohort versus other cohorts?

Victoria: We are going to be introducing over time different kinds of experiences for these clients.

Victoria: For example, we had an activation experience where we had a Ganassi Racing come to our branches in our pilot markets.

Victoria: You could have a Ganassi Racing experience as part of PNC TotalRewards.

Victoria: You could go in a racing simulator, you had a little museum, different things.

Victoria: We had hundreds of clients who interacted with that experience, and we’re going to track them over time to see, do they remember the experience?

Victoria: How likely does it make them to do more with PNC?

Victoria: How likely does it make them to tell other people about PNC?

Victoria: We’re testing into those things as well, because we know they move the needle.

Victoria: Clients love experiences.

Victoria: They’re very experiential.

Victoria: We will be testing both the secondaries, is what I call them, in addition to the primary because they all contribute.

Aaron: Yeah.

Aaron: I love hearing that.

Aaron: That’s incredible because everyone talks about Experiences Matter, but you’re actually taking the time to say, hey, we know this person actually attended this Experience A, and then go back and ask them later on, like, do you still recall that?

Aaron: Was that meaningful for you?

Aaron: Does that play a role?

Aaron: Then tie it back.

Aaron: Very, very good.

Aaron: Oh, very cool.

Aaron: Listen, I know we’re getting close to our time, but I do want to talk a bit about the road ahead, and if you don’t mind being a little vulnerable for us, perhaps you can share, and I know you’ve learned a ton of things through the process of filling out PNC TotalRewards, but was there anything that surprised you or changed how you thought about looting in this category from going through this experience?

Victoria: It highlighted the psychology behind loyalty.

Victoria: That was one of the key things that I took away.

Victoria: Because I had built various aspects of loyalty programs and run various aspects of loyalty programs before.

Victoria: But coming into a company like this and moving through a process like this, I learned that I had to reach the people inside of PNC before I could reach the people outside of PNC.

Aaron: Oh, I think that’s a killer line for this entire conversation.

Victoria: I can’t do anything.

Victoria: I banished the word I on our team.

Victoria: I was like, we’re going to say we.

Victoria: I was like, no, we don’t own anything.

Victoria: They all own everything.

Victoria: We need to say we.

Victoria: Yeah.

Victoria: Because we can’t do anything on our own.

Victoria: We needed everybody.

Victoria: We needed all 55,000 people at PNC to be on this bus and excited about this program and ready to go, or it was going to fail.

Victoria: We did everything we could to ensure that happened.

Victoria: We did everything we could to learn every different group’s love language.

Victoria: What was it that you care about?

Victoria: To make sure that we’re catering to it and addressing it.

Victoria: We spent a lot of time.

Victoria: We talked about doing an employee pilot and starting all of that early.

Victoria: As soon as we had a minimum viable product because we needed them to be on the bus and excited about it.

Victoria: Yeah, we needed to validate features, but we also needed them to be in.

Victoria: We had over a fifth of the company was enrolled in the program before it started to go out to clients.

Victoria: We did that through, we had these events.

Victoria: We would show up at the town halls and we would do fun stuff with people and we bring cool toys and tools and everything else.

Victoria: We had Willy Wonka and the Golden Ticket.

Victoria: We had a good time because they all get the gold tier in the program.

Victoria: It was so important to engage them, it was so important to make them excited because they were the ones that make PNC work, it’s not us.

Victoria: We’re just kind of back here in the back.

Victoria: They were the ones that really mattered.

Victoria: So that was the important thing for us.

Aaron: I love that.

Aaron: I think there’s such a great juxtaposition with brilliantly boring but yet the way in which you’re engaging.

Aaron: It sounds like the PNC culture and people are just not brilliantly boring, but the way that they deliver for your clients is certainly something of that.

Aaron: So that’s amazing that you can bring those two things that seemingly are a paradox together.

Aaron: So let’s talk a little bit about the future.

Aaron: So what does PNC Bank want PNC TotalRewards to be in five years?

Aaron: You know, you’re new to launch, so what does a mature, high-performing version of this program really look like?

Aaron: And what would have to be true, I guess, for you guys to get there?

Victoria: Yeah.

Victoria: You know, in the next five years, we talked a little bit about this, kind of through this.

Victoria: You know, we said, okay, we’ve built this baseline, right?

Victoria: We built this baseline infrastructure that we can build upon.

Victoria: And first, we’re targeting, you know, a lot of the emerging mass-fluent and the retail.

Victoria: There’s a lot of customization we could do for our mass-market clients, right?

Victoria: To encourage them and help them along in their financial relationship with us.

Victoria: Our private bank clients, each one has a different way of approaching them, but it’s all the same capability set, right?

Victoria: Then we have our small business clients, and so we’re working on different aspects of things for all the different groups of those clients.

Victoria: So we need to create scalable ways and capability sets and structures that make that easy.

Victoria: So if I think about the next five years for PNC TotalRewards, it’s really to elongate that continuum across the board.

Aaron: I love that.

Aaron: That’s a great, succinct way to describe it for sure.

Aaron: Before my final question, I do want to give you the floor a little bit.

Aaron: Is there anything you want loyalty marketers and financial service leaders to take away from the PNC TotalRewards story that we just haven’t had time to cover?

Aaron: I may be missing my questions today.

Victoria: Oh, gosh.

Aaron: Let’s get open, yes.

Victoria: I think one of the things I think about is, I know there’s financial services all over the world, but the client-centric nature of this program, it was very hard to execute.

Victoria: It was hard technically to execute, but it was very hard from a people process to execute, because there’s a lot of silos that grow up in organizations.

Victoria: And as a result, a lot of people shy away from that, or they shy away from creating something that’s really a truly horizontal strategy, if I think of all kind of loyalty programs.

Victoria: And I guess my encouragement to your listeners would be, do it.

Victoria: Take the leap, right?

Victoria: Because at the end of the day, it’s not only gonna make your loyalty program better, it’s gonna make your company better.

Victoria: It’s gonna make your company better able to service your clients directly, and it’s gonna make them talk to each other in a way that maybe they don’t today.

Victoria: There’s a lot of value in that.

Aaron: Well, I certainly think that what you’re doing at PNC and with the PNC team, it sounds like, is certainly leading the way, particularly financial services to be, for more probably to follow suit and take that leap as well, but at least you’re out front leading.

Aaron: So that’s impressive.

Aaron: So kudos to you for that.

Aaron: To close out, Bill and I, we love ending our conversations with our own version of a question that we ask all of our guests on the Wiser Loyalty series, and it comes down to this.

Aaron: Can you share, and it can be personal and professional, but if you can share one moment where you had a genuine epiphany about why customer loyalty works in your life, that would be great to hear from you.

Victoria: I think it’s just about relationships.

Victoria: Okay, vulnerability, you know, for me, like the technology has always been a little easier for me, you know, the ones and the zeros, right?

Victoria: It’s more set, right?

Victoria: But the relationships with people, it’s a little more challenging because there’s all these different types of people and all these different types of relationships.

Victoria: But the relationship is really the most important thing at the end of the day.

Victoria: You can know everything in the world, but if you don’t have the good relationship, you’re just not going to work out, right?

Victoria: I know it’s probably a simple thing to say, but for me, that truly is the epiphany.

Victoria: It’s so the relationship, building the relationships, maintaining the relationships across the board is just really important.

Aaron: I think that’s an eloquent way to summarize what loyalty is all about.

Aaron: It really is down to the relationships.

Aaron: I don’t think we say it often enough in our industry, so thank you for reminding of us of that, Victoria.

Aaron: Appreciate it.

Aaron: For everyone who’s been listening on today’s podcast, we also want to thank you for your time.

Aaron: We know it’s valuable.

Aaron: Victoria, I want to thank you for taking the time to have this conversation with us.

Aaron: Certainly learned a lot.

Aaron: Very excited to see more from PNC going forward in not only the coming months, but also the years that are ahead as you alluded to in terms of what your ambition is, and for everyone else, I think they’ll want to follow along as well too.

Aaron: So we’ll probably have to have you back in a little while to talk more about PNC TotalRewards success in the future.

Aaron: But thank you for coming today.

Aaron: We do appreciate it.

Victoria: Thanks, Aaron.

Aaron: Great.

Aaron: And for everyone else, as always, stay loyal.

Paula: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Let’s Talk Loyalty.

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