Making It Easy To Buy Financial Products

Ten years on from the launch of Tesco Personal Finance, Anthony Thomson talks to Chief Executive Robin Bulloch about where TPF is now and where it is going.
What do you see as the objectives for Tesco Personal Finance?
At Tesco, everything we do starts with ‘what does the customer want?’. Tesco Personal Finance is no exception to that. Our number one objective is to give customers what they want in terms of products, value for money and service.
How would you define the business model and how does it differentiate between a traditional bank provider and a retailer?
The first and most obvious difference is that we don’t have a network of branches. The second thing is banks try and use the opportunity of the customer branch visit as a way of selling their products. Currently we rely on our brand, convenience, competitiveness and the quality of our product to attract customers to choose us. Largely our engagement model is over the phone and through
Tesco.com. We may change things going forward to have a more interactive engagement with customers in store , but the key difference is that customers come to us to buy, we don’t go to them to sell.
In the sense that you don’t have branches.
We are trialling some initiatives around in-store engagement with customers. This year we have had a very successful foray into giving customers access to our credit card, health insurance and our dental
insurance products in store. Because customers have supported this we will do more of this next year. We have also opened the ‘Tesco Finance Centre’ on the south side of Glasgow at Silverburn. Customers have asked us to provide dedicated space in-store where they have the opportunity to speak to an expert, face to face, about our products. We have received very positive feedback from customers in terms of both the quality of our staff, the fact that they can interact with us in store, our opening hours and, of course, we have the beauty of lots of parking in a very convenient location. It’s very early days and we are viewing it as a learning laboratory.
Please download the PDF version to read the full interview.