Chase trends – where have the customers gone?
Take a look at the graph of average daily visits of our site for the last 10 months.
Daily average site visits (per month)
This would seem to indicate that more people, not less, are looking for information on problems and difficulties with Chase.
When it comes to posting Chase-related stories and information on this blog, I don’t exactly go out of my way to find them; I post what people send me or what Google Alerts finds for me. Now look at the trend in posts over the last 10 months.
Posts per month
Holy cow! That is about a five fold increase in posts per month. Clearly, more and more people are posting their dissatisfaction with Chase online.
I realize this information is very anecdotal and could mean different things. When reported incidents of disease go up, you have to ask, is the disease spreading, or are just a higher percentage of people reporting being sick? This could mean that Chase is getting worse, or that Chase has been bad enough for long enough that more people are reaching that boiling point where they want to do something about it.
What about number of retail banking customers? That would surely be a good indicator of whether people are leaving Chase. Well, Chase doesn’t make those numbers available, but they do make their total deposit numbers available.
- 4Q2008: $1,009 Billion
- 4Q2009: $938 Billion
- 1Q2010: $925 Billion
Hmm. Ok, well that seems to be yet another trend for Chase in the wrong direction. Either all Chase customers have become 8.3% poorer over that 15 month period, or Chase clearly lost some customers. Let’s take a look at the US savings rate and household net worth over that period.
Household net worth
Sorry Chase, not only has the personal savings rate been very high during that period, but household net worth went up 6%, even as housing prices went down, meaning personal savings probably went up considerably more than 6%. And with lots of individual investors sitting out of the stock market in the last couple of years, this can only mean the money is in mattresses or banks. Apparently, it isn’t in Chase bank.
So, if we add up a 6% increase in household net worth and an 8% decline in Chase deposits overall, my best guess is that they have lost at least 14% of their depositors. Wow! No wonder they don’t include those figures on their financial statements.
Interesting | admin June 29, 2010
