The iPod music player has established itself as the toaster of the new millennium, a giveaway that banks use to attract attention, and new deposits, from young consumers.
Now a mid-western bank is experimenting to see if it can offer the equivalent of toast, content that will enable it to develop relationships with this target market.
UMB Financial Corp. of Kansas City, Mo., said this week that it had produced the first of three planned podcasts - downloadable audio files that can be played on a computer or a portable device - aimed at a younger crowd.
"We're trying to engage the next generation of customers and watching the trends and some of the new ways that the more Web- or Internet-savvy consumers are doing things," said J. Mariner Kemper, UMB's chairman and chief executive. "Podcasts were one of the things that came up on the radar screen." The company does not give away the music player itself.
The podcasts can be downloaded free from umb.com and Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes downloading site. From Friday to midday Thursday the UMB program has been downloaded 268 times from both sources; its only advertising was a press release and an e-mail to UMB's 3,500 employees. UMB says it hosts 16,057 visits to its Web site on a typical day.
Mr. Kemper said it may be hard to measure the podcast's influence. It lists an e-mail address at the very end for feedback but does not ask listeners to say whether it might get them to visit the bank.
"It will be up to the consumers to let us know that that's why they're visiting with us," Mr. Kemper said. "Hopefully, they will let us know, and we'll track some of it."
In UMB's first podcast, K.C. Mathews, an executive vice president at the $7.1 billion-asset company and its director of portfolio management, describes 401(k) retirement accounts. The energetic, lighthearted format resembles a radio show, and Mr. Mathews keeps it simple when discussing issues such as inflation. "Today a Big Mac might cost three and a half dollars - what's it going to cost in 30 years?" he says.
Mr. Kemper said the podcasts provide a convenient way to introduce the younger set to retirement accounts and other complex financial products. "People want advice, but we're in a fast-paced world," he said.
The UMB podcast faces stiff competition on iTunes: Apple says more than 10 million people use the site and that more than 25,000 podcasts are available.
Dan Schatt, a senior analyst at the Boston market research firm Celent Communications LLC, said a bank should be more focused on offering - and promoting - podcasts through its own Web site rather than hoping it gets noticed on iTunes.
"At this point, you really have to be a dedicated customer and informed by the bank" to be interested in downloading the podcast, he said.
If done properly, a podcast can "keep you listening, keep you involved with the bank, and give you a value-added service," he said.
Bank podcasts may not be a trend in themselves, but a baby step on the way to a larger trend of banks' taking advantage of what can be done over high-speed Internet connections, Mr. Schatt said. "Beyond that, I see videos and potential bank TV channels that you'll be able to access."
Chris Musto, an analyst at Keynote WebExcellence, a division of Keynote Systems Inc. of San Mateo, Calif., said UMB may have trouble finding an audience.
"There's a lot of podcasting going on out there," Mr. Musto said. "Banks are not going to get very much mileage by saying, 'We've got a podcast of something.' That alone means nothing."
Though UMB's podcast sounds like a professionally produced radio show, he said many other podcasts sound that way.
Some radio stations have long offered their programming for download. "In the world of iTunes and the world of podcasts, this is not earth-shattering," he said.
All that matters, he said, "is that if you have long-form content that people want to be listening to anyway, this makes it easier to close the deal, to get them listening to it. That's all it means."
The ultimate question is whether the message engages the customer.
"If people don't really want to listen to this content, it doesn't matter if it's in a podcast," Mr. Musto said.
"Then again," he said, "at some point a broker or a bank tried having a Web site, and on the whole that's gone pretty well."
