Keep your hands off my data. (consumer financial information)

Consumers are increasingly concerned about who has access to their financial information and how its being used.

Banks can either be the source of consumer anxiety - or can reassure consumers that their privacy is well-guarded.

The availability of detailed information on consumers is startling - especially to consumers themselves. Marketers have quickly learned to take advantage of that wealth of information to get the word out about their products and services and bank marketers are no different. At the same time, consumers are growing more and more wary of how their information is being used.

Today, banks can select and target prospects based upon dozens of criteria. Skillful analysis and manipulation of customer-reported information combined with outside information has created tremendous opportunities for selling bank services to segments of consumers most likely to be interested in the offer. Wasting expenditures on consumers or existing customers who are not interested or who would not otherwise be likely to be interested in the offer is almost a thing of the past.

This marketing sophistication has always been available, but the technology historically has been too costly. In the early 1970s, maintaining a customer's name and address on the computer cost about $7.13. Today, the cost is about a penny. Now, our capacity to collect, combine and manipulate information is so vast that the bigger challenge is to decide which information to use in achieving our objectives.

Privacy Concerns Are Growing

Plummeting data management costs and the ballooning information industry have caused many in the industry to overlook an emerging concern - the customer's right to privacy. Over the last few years, consumers have become increasingly worried about and suspicious of how companies use information about them. These concerns are fed from a number of sources. From a bank's perspective, the most sensitive source of consumer anxiety about privacy is probably the credit reporting agencies which have been under attack from all directions. They are not the sole source of the alarm, but their approach to privacy …