Recommendations on Loyalty Increase of the Students Holding a Banking Scholarship Card on the Example of VTB Bank

Each year, banks that provide scholarship payment services to university students increase their client base with the first-year students. And despite the students are considered to be a low-income segment, investments in loyalty development of this segment are justified, since the attractiveness of this same audience in the long term is high. The presented research touches upon the effectiveness of the bank's approach to servicing students in terms of forming their loyalty to the bank. The selected object of the study is VTB Bank, which serves the students of the Higher School of Economics. The work goal is to develop recommendations for VTB Bank on increasing the loyalty level and improving the relations with the students’ segment. To achieve the research goal, a series of preliminary studies was required. In the first place, the loyalty factors and the bank selection criteria among the students were identified among the foreign and Russian studies. Further, based on the analysis of the foreign market of banking services, practices of offering special products for students were defined and compared with the Russian practices. The obtained data were verified then with the in-depth interviews with the students of the HSE, which allowed to formulate hypotheses for the final quantitative research. To test the hypotheses, a survey was conducted among the students of the HSE university, in which 135 respondents took part. According to the results of the survey, it was revealed that HSE students are not the active clients of VTB, and their loyalty to VTB is significantly lower than to the competitor banks. Based on the analysed barriers to using the scholarship card by students and on the prioritization of the product and service attributes by the Kano method, recommendations were developed for VTB aimed to increase the behavioral and emotional loyalty of the student segment. The suggested changes can also be extended to other banks working with students.