Chris Baumann, Lecturer in Business and Assistant Director of GACC, Associate Professor Sue Burton and Professor Greg Elliott (both from MGSM), won the Best Paper Award in Marketing at the Western Decision Sciences Institute conference held in Vancouver, Canada, in March 2005.

The conference allows academics and business professionals from all over the world to share information and research with respect to all aspects of education, business, and organizational decisions.

In their paper "Predicting Actual Consumer Behaviour in Retail Banking", it was found that 25-65% of the variance in customer loyalty can be predicted. The study shows that actual behaviour is best predicted by demographic factors such as age, income and a customer's residential location. Overall satisfaction and affective attitude were found to be strong predictors of future behavioural intentions, but they were not found to be significantly associated with actual behaviour after allowing for the effects of all the other predictors in the model.

Banks could use the findings of this study to profile customers with potential for growth on either side of retail banking, the depositing and the borrowing one, since the researchers have developed separate models for the prediction of share of wallet in terms of deposits and also for debts/loans.

A journal article "Determinants of customer loyalty and share of wallet in retail banking" containing more details on this research is forthcoming in the Journal of Financial Services Marketing (Volume 9).