I look forward to speaking at Qurated Network – Director’s Forum on Valentine’s Day in London. It will be interesting to see if we all end up agreeing whether banks’ ever increasing use of customer data is going to get their customers to love them more, or end up in broken relationships! It should be a fascinating debate

PS – and it was indeed fascinating! Great to see the diversity of views from my fellow panellists David Power from Wonga, Matt Rowsell from Worldpay, and Javier Campos from WPP. Personally I think banks should be wary of emulating retailers too slavishly in their use of data to push targeted marketing to their customers.

As Matt pointed out, we tend to give permission to the likes of google and Amazon to target us. We might set the bar higher for banks, and don’t give them implied permission to exploit data about us in the same way. And as Matt and Javier both showed, banks have an almighty challenge to piece together all the different pieces of data they have about us, across their legacy systems, which gives them endless opportunity to draw wrong inferences.

My own conclusion is that there are elements of the data-exploiting online retailer model that banks could usefully follow, but they should carefully aim to set their own standards. I think we all agreed that the overall aim for banks should be to focus on delivering a great customer experience, across services which consumers really need them to get right.

There is a short video of the event at http://bit.ly/2lifrFB