Public Bank "U Save V Reward" Contest

Posted by Kris | Wednesday, July 20, 2011 | | 0 comments »


When I got a call from bank, it is usually those never give-up cold calling receptionists trying to get me to do balance transfer on my credit card. 

So, I am the at the verge of saying "I am not interested", before the receptionist mentioned that there is an ongoing contest by public bank. At first, i thought I was about to being told that i was the lucky winner. It is very rare that the bank will call up the customers just to tell them about a contest. (It might be a scam or etc so i decided to hang on.) Looks like Public Bank still don't really fully utilize Facebook or Twitter to spread the word around.

As i found out, looks like the caller is genuine. To enter the contest, you must at least have an average monthly RM1,000 in Public Bank savings or current account. Each RM1000 is entitled to 30 draws to win monthly prizes.

The contest will run from 15 March 2011 to 30 September 2011.

Just go to this link for more details. The prizes and conditional is quite tier like. If you analyze these contest, the marketing guys is really clever at Public Bank.

Here are my thoughts:
1. Public Bank encourages you to put as much money to get the most draws (30 draws for RM1,000 savings account) at the start of the campaign both. Not surprisingly, the prize for April is 10 winners x RM6,800. Fast forward to September where each RM1,000 in saving account will only entitle you for 10 draws only.  If you were so gungho to put your nest egg from April to September, you might get the lowest possible return in attempt to strike a jackpot. Putting money in FD has better returns than this. Nevertheless, you never know that you might the lucky one strike the prize.

2. On the long run, this contest is actually encouraging more people to open a savings or current account at Public Bank. The stratagem employed by Public Bank is actually.....

Public Banks wants to tap into the saving/fixed deposit market (very stable revenue stream and to boost their cash reserves), as most probably the housing/consumer loans  market are getting dried up as property prices in Malaysia reached bubble like scenarios. It might get risky if they continue to aggressively loan out money to house buyers who already have like 2-3 properties or using his/her spouse name to buy more property. 

Nowadays, I see valuer are valuing properties as over-valued for secondary market home buyers. This rating usually don't augur well to the customer's chance to borrow money from the bank if the customer is not that financially strong.

Well, above is just my ramblings..there is no conspiracy theory involved here. Public Bank like any bank is in the business of making money not charity/throwing money away :P


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