Customer
1. Customer
In another angle, the banker brings together those who have surplus fund and those who are in need of it. This has been the process for the last few decades in India. Now due to the opening of new avenues for both deployment of surplus fund and also for securing funds, meeting of depositor and borrower via banks are now meeting without the mediation of bank. There are a number of non-banking alternatives for the depositor like share market, Post office saving, UTI, mutual funds and company fixed deposit. All these are investment avenues and many other similar ones have flooded in to the Indian financial market. Furthermore, it is an unavoidable process of rapid economic growth. The outcome of these processes is undermining the traditional banking function of intermediary between investors and borrowers. This is known as the process of financial disintermediation.
The basic outcome is that the process of financial disintermediation cut the roof of traditional banking. On the one side, deposit mobilization is threatened because of alternative lucrative investment avenues are available to depositors. Similar is the case for lending aspect also because borrowers can now access cheaper and less cumbersome avenues for raising resources. In a nutshell, financial disintermediation has created a serious threat to the very survival and growth of basic banking activities.
In such a situation, banks have been frantically looking for alternatives to survive and thrive. It is here that bank marketing came to their rescue. With its emphasis on the centrality of the customer to entire banking operations, the bank marketing concept has provided a way out in the form of a host of new banking services and instruments. Bank marketing has emerged as the principal survival strategy for banks confronted with an accelerating pace of disintermediation.