Building Perx: a two-sided employee-benefits platform for Standard Bank

Standard Bank wanted to strengthen its digital acquisition and cross-sell channels across two divisions at once: Business & Commercial Banking, which serves employers, and Personal & Private Banking, which serves their employees.

The bank needed a proposition that would deepen its relationship with business clients while simultaneously creating a route to new personal-banking customers — and it needed that proposition to enhance revenue and customer experience rather than simply add another marketing channel.

Acquisition through traditional channels is expensive, and cross-sell between a bank's business and personal franchises is notoriously hard to engineer. A benefits platform that employers actively want to offer their staff turns the bank's existing commercial relationships into a distribution channel for its personal-banking propositions.

For employers, the stake was an attractive staff benefit at no cost to the business; for employees, access to advice and deals they would not otherwise reach. Aligning those incentives was the condition for the platform working at all.

The platform was engineered as a two-sided marketplace connecting the bank's Business & Commercial Banking clients with those clients' employees, who are prospective Personal & Private Banking customers.

Rather than selling to employees directly, the platform routes through the employer relationship: businesses enrol and offer Perx as a staff benefit, and the bank's propositions reach employees as part of a benefits package rather than as outbound marketing.

Perx is a platform engineered to enhance revenue and improve the customer experience, structured as an employee-benefits marketplace. Employers can offer the programme to their staff at no cost to the business.

Through Perx, employees gain access to world-class financial advice alongside exclusive deals and discounts spanning banking, insurance and lifestyle benefits — a single destination that packages the bank's propositions with broader lifestyle value.

Through Perx, Standard Bank aims to significantly increase its revenue while providing an enhanced customer experience. No quantified results have been published for the platform to date.

The platform gives the bank a structural cross-sell bridge between its commercial and personal franchises: every employer that adopts Perx extends the bank's reach to that employer's workforce.