Drivers of cross‐sectoral cross‐buying behaviour among business customers

This paper aims to examine the extent of and key determinants for bank and insurance provider selection and usage by business customers from the small to medium‐sized enterprise (SME) segment, thereby aiming to increase understanding of the drivers of customers' cross‐buying behaviour across these financial service sectors.

Semi‐structured interviews were carried out with key decision makers from 22 SMEs within one country. Content analysis was employed to analyse the data.

Empirical findings suggest use of multiple banks as the norm among SMEs, whereas insurances are dominantly purchased from a single provider. As SME customers appear to prefer using separate, independent providers for their banking and insurance services, absence of customer loyalty programs, unfavourable pricing of the total offering and image conflicts were identified as main factors limiting the willingness to cross‐buy across these financial services sectors.

This qualitative research is focused on the financial industry within one country and bound to smaller business customers, limiting the generalisability of the findings.

The results imply that in order to succeed in cross‐selling bank and insurance services in the SME segment, financial service providers should improve their cross‐selling concepts by creating customer loyalty programs that would reward customer companies according to the use of multiple products in their total portfolio.

This study is the first to describe the customer perceived drivers of cross‐buying bank and insurance services from the same service provider in the business‐to‐business context.